Winner
Diverse in Unity
But you see, that's not how it works. We see the political spectrum differently. There are at least (!!) two dimensions of policy - the economic dimension (how the economy should be organized/regulated) and the social dimension (to what extent should peoples' public/private lives be regulated by the state).
Unfortunately, there is not a perfect correlation between the two, which is what is skewing comparisons between European and American politics.
For example, let's take the word "liberal". In Europe this can mean both social and economic liberalism, but in most cases liberal parties are seen as centre-right. In the US it's a generic term for all things "left wing", because there is a marked conflict between conservatives and liberals. This isn't true in Europe - conservative parties (Christian Democrats, moderate nationalists, etc.) like to make coalitions with the Liberals. There is one such coalition in Germany, another in Sweden IIRC, and now even in Britain (!!!).
It's like if we were using two completely different "operating systems". Or rather, different units of measurement
It's thus extremely difficult to make good analogies between American and European politics. When even our most hard-line, right-wing, fascist/neo-Nazi party (the BNP) won't hear a word of dismantling the NHS, chances are that comparing European and American political standpoints is doomed to failure
Quite.
American Democrats have so many different aspects to them which in Europe rarely occur together in one political party. On some issues, they seem pretty right wing, on some they appear distinctly left wing. I guess that due to the 2-party system, they integrate everything that's usually distributed over a number of centre-left to centre-right parties.
As for the Republicans, they probably have no parallel in Europe. Even the European far-right seem like a bunch of boy scouts compared to them
