The Centre Party, which in 1994 led the campaign against joining the European club, is fiercely against both.
One pillar, the Centre Party, has been supporting the Social Democrats and is not keen on a Moderate-led government.
In the outgoing parliament, the largely rural Centre Party generally backed the government thanks to Mr Persson's promise to close nuclear power-stations.
Plainly, Mr Bondevik's Christian People's Party does not get on with its partners, the rural Centre Party and the free-market Liberals.
The Centre Party leader, Maud Olofsson, is tipped for industry and trade.
ECONOMIST: Out with the Social Democrats, in with the Moderates
Mr Bayrou wants an all-embracing new centre party to outflank the Front.
But Mr Ventura is at least half-right when he says that Mr Buchanan does not fit into what is really a centre party.
He has already scored a strategic victory by persuading the Centre Party (a junior coalition member) to revoke its 1980 decision to phase out nuclear power.
ECONOMIST: A surprising revival in previously reviled nuclear power
Labour's Yossi Beilin, a long-time campaigner for getting out of Lebanon, was joined this week by the Likud's Michael Eitan and the Centre Party's Ronni Milo.
Another unsuccessful contender was the New Wasat or Centre Party.
This time, three women are among the four front-runners but, if the opinion pollsters are right, they are all lying behind Esko Aho, the (male) leader of the Centre Party.
It has been forging a close alliance with the green-minded Centre Party witness a decision in February to start shutting down Sweden's nuclear power plants, which provide half the country's electricity.
New Democracy, a right-of-centre party led by Constantine Karamanlis, an untested young leader (and nephew of the late president of the same name), is still struggling to get his party under control.
The right-wing opposition disagrees with the decision to close Barseback, but has not made much of the issue in the approach to the September election: it, too, is courting the Centre Party.
So the new energy minister, Marit Arnstad, a fierce young woman from the Centre Party, says that oil and gas production will have to be curbed or at least kept down to its present rate.
Mr Barak's latest political blow came on March 6th when Yitzhak Mordechai, the minister of transport and leader of the Centre Party, was charged by a young woman on his staff with sexual assault and harassment.
Fears that the next election might have a similar outcome led Preston Manning, Reform's leader, to launch a crusade aimed at creating a single right-of-centre party at the federal level, to be called the United Alternative.
Yet another of Mr Rubinstein's political hot potatoes is a police investigation, now nearing completion, into allegations of sexual assault and sexual harassment by yet another coalition member, Yitzhak Mordechai, transport minister and leader of the Centre Party.
If that causes coalition-busting ructions, the rural-based Centre Party, which has a mildly Euro-sceptical flavour and is still the second-largest party in parliament (its share has gone up to 48 seats), might win another shot at running Finland.
The Greens also voted against the government's bill as the left-of-centre party accused ministers of betraying the despairing and vulnerable, who were seeking Australia's protection, but could be doomed to spend years in dusty camps in the South Pacific.
The Centre Party had anyhow been coming apart at the seams, but Mr Barak is also having little joy from his two main coalition partners, the Sephardic- Orthodox Shas party and the leftist-secular Meretz party, which are at each other's throats over state finance for Shas schools.
But all the main party leaders Mr Netanyahu, Mr Barak and Yitzhak Mordechai, the leader of the new Centre Party are still on the defensive against a growing body of opinion that calls for immediate and unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon without reference to the Syrians or indeed to the Lebanese.
Both the centre-left Labour party and the centre-right VVD party won a sufficient number of votes between themselves to rule with a majority in the lower houses of parliament.
BBC: Netherlands election analysis: Dutch show faith in Europe
The ruling left-of-centre Labour Party lost just two seats and less than two percentage points of the vote.
Four years ago, the voters swept out a conservative city council in favour of a left-of-centre civic party.
ECONOMIST: A great city more troubled than it is cracked up to be
Alliance, as an identifiably centre ground party, is the one bucking the trend - with 51% Protestant backing and 36% Catholic support.
BBC: Opinion poll indicates NI voters would reject Irish unity
Wim Kok, the genially consensual prime minister, and his left-of-centre Labour Party did best, topping the poll with 29% of the vote.
His only transgression had been to break a campaign rule by saying that he wanted the left-of-centre Uri party to do well in April's legislative elections.
In the Netherlands too there have been some interesting recent currents, with the centre right party expressing greater reservations about European integration, expropriating some of the language once confined to the extremes.
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