No, it's the same-old, same-old. Back half a year ago, I wrote four diaries [1, 2, 3, 4] summarising the Danish political situation. I re-read them recently to see how my predictions from back then scored against reality on the ground half a year later, and I think that they remain a mostly accurate summary of the state of play, even if the last one is a bit petulant on account of my team just having lost the election...

There are a couple of minor updates worth mentioning:

• New Alliance has more or less completely purged the moderate Seeberg wing. It has also lost half its MPs or so. My tea-leaf reading is that it's disintegrating faster than Space Shuttle Columbia on re-entry.

• The general strike I promised failed to materialise. Instead we got two more localised strikes at the same time: One in the health care sector and one in daycare and various other low-wage service functions. The strikers won, more or less. I don't know how bad it was for the government, because I was in Sweden most of the time it went on, but they went on for rather longer than Danish strikes usually do.

• The Popular Socialists have taken a hard right turn on their rhetoric; whether this is street theatre or mirrors a genuine shift in policy remains to be seen. Either way, it's worrisome.

• There have been some jittery moments, but by and large the ruling VKO(Y) coalition has been stable. I personally expect this to continue, but as noted above the Ponzi economics of the past decade is in the process of collapsing, and I'd hate to place any expensive bets on what that's going to do to the political situation.

• The irresponsible policies w.r.t. taxation and general statecraft are unchanged (well, some of the most outrageously moronic ministers have been shuffled to positions of relative unimportance, so there has arguably been a small improvement on the execution side - although definitely not on the policy side).

And that's basically the long and short of it.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.