"Le Vote 'Non'" Fallout Starts

I was reading the Guardian (London) this morning doing some research for my wife's blog, and found a good write-up of the falling out from the weekend's election in France rejecting the European Union constitution.

• Jean-Pierre Raffarin is out as prime minister and Dominique de Villepin is in, tasked with trying to save the Cherac government after the vote. de Villepin was the leading voice in France against the war in Iraq, so it will be fun to watch him squirm a bit in his new post.
• Charac rival Nicolas Sarkozy didn't get the PM slot, but is in at Interior Minister.
  
• Opinon polls say the Dutch will reject the constitution tomorrow, by even higher margin's than France's strong 55% statement.
• In England, Tony Blair has refused to cancel a referendum vote, even though it appears increasingly likely that the people of Great Britain and France are united on this one.
  

Also while Beth-Blogging, I found a book review that's related. Called Dead Europe, by Aussie novelist Christos Tsiolkas (not on Amazon yet), the book paints a picture of Europe that many of us would nod our heads to:

Dead Europe stinks. The stench is the pornographic decay of contemporary Western decadence. Isaac, an Australian photographer born to Greek immigrants, journeys through Europe in the wake of the Berlin Wall collapse and the Balkan wars. Expecting the sophisticated high culture of his youthful imagination, travels and longings, he finds something radically different. His family's home continent is a theme park. Overweight neo-bourgeois tourists swarm from Paris to Santorini, "in Prada, Gucci and Versace ... drinking, eating and speaking loudly and ostentatiously on their mobile phones", and young professionals debate the best source of ecstasy and LSD: Amsterdam, London or Barcelona? Beneath it all lies the rot of dead and damaged bodies: newer ones of prostitutes and asylum-seekers, untermenschen from beyond the eastern limits of Old Europe; older ones from death camps, pogroms, purges and revolutions. The land of Dead Europe is stained and haunted.

The EU vote may be a sign that Europe is coming back from the dead. I think that's probably too optimistic a take on the situation, but I am a believer in pendulums, and Europe has swung terribly far towards the dysfunctional, decadent and dead. Some day, it will start moving back towards a healthier position and the pressures of this vote, dealing with Muslimification and the failure of Socialism are all instruments toward that end.