I'll now hand you over to my best man, Eddie.

Wow, wow, wow, second time's a charm, eh, Billy Boy?

Oh God.

Substitution, courtesy of Paddy Power, embarrassing Eddie, makes way for sensible Samuel.

Cool, that was close.

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18 plus scummelware.org. We've had a week with a lot of elections. And there have been two

big narratives. One is a bit more straightforward?

The laws of political gravity are finally hitting the far right.

In local French elections, Marine LePence's national rally failed to win some of the big cities it was going for.

And Georgia Maloney narrowly lost a key referendum in Italy, throwing her

government into turmoil. Okay, so that's one storyline. But these little hiccups for the far right

obscure the more existential trend we're tracking this week. The slow motion freefall of Europe's

center left.

In Danish elections, yes, socialist Prime Minister Meta Fredrickson won,

but her party shrank sharply to its lowest point in a century.

Paris is still left, but France as a whole very much isn't.

And Germany's SPD? In government,

sure, but losing elections in a way that would have been hard to imagine just a few years ago.

So what's actually going on here? Is Europe's social democratic movement still a serious contender with a strong identity and clear governing vision? Or are the real political battles these days playing out exclusively on the right side of the spectrum?

...