He’s everywhere. Travel the length and breadth of Russia and he’ll be your constant companion. The Prime Minister, Dominique de Villepin, has collapsed in opinion polls, precisely because he refused to consult before pushing through an easy hire-easy fire jobs contract for the young.. In comments to French magazines she says she plans to express the hunger of ordinary people in France for a more direct role in politics and a less aloof ruling class.As a marketing idea, Mme Royal’s approach could not be bettered. She says she wishes to be “ready”, if it becomes clear that she has the best chance of leading the centre-left to a triumph in the two-round elections next April and May. In recent opinion polls, she has not only outdistanced any other likely rivals on the left but overhauled the most likely centre-right candidate, the Interior Minister, Nicolas Sarkozy.The virtual campaign on her site ( www.desirsdavenir ) is intended to position Mme Royal as a grassroots, rather than top-down candidate. A final text, drawing on the suggestions of web visitors but written by Mme Royal, will be published in September – two months before the Parti Socialiste chooses its candidate for next spring’s presidential election.Although a similar approach has been used by small parties elsewhere, this is believed to be the first time that a strong candidate for a leading party in a large country has offered an “interactive”, internet-led political campaign.Officially, Mme Royal, long-time partner of the Parti Socialiste’s first secretary, Fran?s Hollande, is not yet a candidate for the presidential elections.

Mme Royal, 52, placed on her website the first of 10 chapters of a political manifesto that will be published in instalments on the internet in the next four months.
The former education and social affairs minister is inviting supporters – and anyone else – to “complete” the book with their own comments and ideas. S?l? Royal, the Socialist politician who is early favourite to be the next President of France, launched the world’s first internet-led electoral campaign yesterday. Whether he wins or loses, he has radicalised the electorate to a greater degree than happened [at the election of] 2001.” James Walston, professor of political science at the American University of Rome, explains: “Mr Berlusconi’s strategy is based on the belief that he can only win by persuading those who voted for him in 2001, but this time prefer not to bother, to get out and vote.” The viewing figures for the second TV debate with Romano Prodi last Monday were thus a heavy blow: down from 16 million to 12 million.. “For better or worse,” wrote Massimo Franco in Corriere della Sera yesterday, “Silvio Berlusconi has succeeded in transforming the election into a referendum on himself.

Italians go to vote in the general election tomorrow and Monday, but in the dying days of the campaign it has become a referendum on the man who has ruled Italy for the past five years. This week Italians have watched agog as Silvio Berlusconi morphed before their eyes into a tinpot dictator, stabbing his finger at the television camera, banging his fists on the podium, red in the face with rage, threatening his enemies and vowing never to surrender. Gone are the jokes, the backslapping, the stabs at chivalry. Stripped away are the intimations of ordinariness, the attempt to identify himself with the Italian everyman that has served him well for years. The court refused to find them guilty of murder, however, finding them guilty only of “hooliganism”.As a result the harshest sentence handed down was just five and a half years.Russian skinheads espouse a mixture of nationalism and fascism and believe that non-whites are responsible for crime, unemployment, and “polluting Russia’s gene pool”.. In 2004 eight youths armed with baseball bats, chains and knives, murdered a nine year-old Tajik girl in St Petersburg.

The manual is reportedly being handed out in leaflet form on St Petersburg’s streets.A court in the city was perceived to have let a group of skinheads off the hook last month despite their committing one of Russia’s worst race crimes of recent years. A Manual For Street Terror urged attackers to wear gloves, shoe covers, and normal clothes to avoid detection and to form “white patrols”. Emboldened by their apparent impunity, St Petersburg-based white supremacists recently published instructions on how to kill a foreigner on the internet. On Sunday a Chinese student was attacked outside her apartment; a Ghanaian man was savagely beaten up in the city’s suburbs in March; a man from Mali was stabbed to death in February; a student from Cameroon was murdered last December and a Congolese student was killed last September. Before they ran off they daubed a nearby wall with a swastika and spray-painted a bold claim of responsibility “Skinheads .. we did it.”The list of other victims is long. They sliced her throat, cut her tongue and left her face covered in blood and gashes.