Europe

The results in the French Presidential Elections are: Jacques Chirac (Gaullist) 19,88 % - 5,666,440 Jean-Marie Le Pen (far right) 16,86 % - 4,805,307 Lionel Jospin (Socialist) 16,18 % - 4,610,749 Francois Bayrou (mainstream right) 6,84 % - 1,949,436 Arlette Laguiller (Trotskyist, Lutte Ouvrière) 5,72 % - 1,630,244 Jean-Pierre Chevènement (populist) 5,33 % - 1,518,901 Noël Mamère (Green) 5,25 % - 1,495,901 Olivier Besancenot (Trotskyist, LCR) 4,25 % - 1,210,694 Jean Saint-Josse (populist) 4,23 % - 1,204,863 Alain Madelin (mainstream right) 3,91 % - 1,113,709 Robert Hue (Communist Party) 3,37 %...

Three million workers took to the streets of Rome on 23 March. In what was probably Italy's biggest ever demonstration, they protested against government plans to scrap job protection laws. A general strike has been called by Italy's three trade union federations for Tuesday 16 April. Liberazione, the newspaper of Italy's socialist party Rifondazione, called Saturday's demonstration "extraordinary". The day would go down in history. But this is just the start of a battle between unions and government. President Silvio Berlusconi wants to scrap a law known as Article 18, which protects the job...

Silvio Berlusconi and Tony Blair, along with Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, are heading up moves within the European Union towards the neoliberal, "flexible" labour market. They have set themselves up as an opposing pole to the dominant Franco-German alliance within the EU. Blair and Berlusconi believe that the Social-Democratic Schröder government in Germany and Lionel Jospin's Socialist administration in France, are too soft on workers' rights. Blair's alliance with Europe's right-wing governments - Berlusconi's coalition includes the extreme anti-immigrant Northern League and...

In its first edition after the demonstrations, Liberazione, paper of the Italian socialist party Rifondazione, described the events. "I don't know if I will find the words to tell you about this great day in Rome, the 'day of the CGIL', which saw gather in the capital a crowd without end, the likes of which no-one can remember. Already trying to count the numbers seems, involuntarily, like rhetoric; perhaps not for those of you who, like me, were mixed in among the thousands and thousands of women, men and children in a sea which grew everywhere and with every glance. Was there ever such a...

Today's Red Brigades appear to be a small offshoot of the Red Brigades which ran terrorist campaigns against the Italian government and business in the late 1970s and 80s. Their attack on Marco Biagi follows a similar killing, three years ago, of another Labour Ministry advisor Massimo D'Antona. Twenty years ago the Red Brigades were responsible for a series of political assassinations, most famously kidnapping and killing a former prime minister, Aldo Moro. They were also - and this helps explain the unions' hostility towards them today - responsible for the murder in 1979 of a trade unionist...