When Mr Laar's right-of-centre coalition took power two years ago, it was determined to reform the machinery of government.
The two leading candidates are the former prime minister, the right-of-centre Mark Rutte, and the centre-left Labour Party's Diederik Samsom.
The French right-of-centre newspaper Le Figaro reports that Mr Hollande's announcement on the TF1 channel appeared to take party colleagues by surprise.
Despite his inexperience, he showed skill in piloting a recent merger of two rival right-of-centre parties, the Canadian Alliance and the Progressive Conservatives.
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The right-of-centre government has argued that the unprecedented tax increases the budget contains were necessary to meet the terms of the country's eurozone bailout.
He is seen as a hawkish, right-of-centre leader whose previous term in office ended ignominiously amid falling popularity and a resignation on grounds of ill health.
On his return to London he became the newspaper's political commentator and in 1999 was appointed editor of the right-of-centre Spectator magazine, which he left in 2005.
Two right-of-centre analyses address these questions in very different ways.
Add in the possibility that a right-of-centre government could join up with the Pensioners' Party, a new party suspicious of pension reform, and you have a formula for years of drift.
Norway's ruling Labour Party risks losing power in next month's parliamentary election (see article), and in Sweden and Denmark social democrats preside over minority governments that face strong right-of-centre challenges in elections next year.
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.
Benjamin Netanyahu, the leader of the right-of-centre Likud party, says he does not want Israel to rule the Palestinians, but says they should not be allowed things he considers a threat to Israeli security, such as an army, control of airspace or the Jordan Valley.
Although Kensington and Chelsea is regarded as a safe Tory seat - Mr Clark held it with a majority of 9, 519 in 1997 - Mr Portillo faces competition for the right-of-centre vote from the Pro European Conservatives, the Referendum Party and the UK Independence Party among others.
The generals want a new national coalition to gather parties of the centre-right and the centre-left together, so enabling the postponement until 2000 of a general election.
They now find themselves, largely by accident since both had been written off as party leaders, at the head of their respective right-wing and left-of-centre groupings.
Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, member of the centre-right Union pour un mouvement populaire party, is one of six candidates running for mayor of the French capital in March 2014.
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The country's slow growth has persisted under governments of centre-right and centre-left.
Mr Fraser, who was seen as the frontrunner, wanted to abolish the Scottish Conservatives - often described by critics as a "toxic brand" - in favour of a new centre-right party.
One consequence of the in-fighting has been the creation this week of a new centre-right party that will run on an explicitly anti-Orthodox platform.
As voting day approaches, Silvio Berlusconi's centre-right House of Liberties coalition is maintaining a clear lead in opinion polls over Francesco Rutelli's centre-left Olive Tree Alliance.
He has ruled out working with Silvio Berlusconi, the former prime minister and head of the centre-right People of Freedom party, which came second.
The parliament's new members will mostly sit in vaguely like-minded groupings, like the centre-right European People's Party (EPP), the Party of European Socialists (centre-left) and the European Liberal Democrats (socially, and sometimes economically, liberal).
Opinion polls still show the combined forces of the left (Socialists, Communists and others) neck-and-neck with the outgoing centre-right coalition in terms of votes, though the right is given a short lead in seats and about a third of voters say they have yet to make up their minds.
The move, which had been widely expected, will allow Mr Dzurinda to head a four-party centre-right coalition of Christian Democrats, Liberals, and ethnic Hungarians.
Germany - The centre-right alliance of Christian Democrats and Social Democrats led by Bavarian prime minister Edmund Stoiber, has a serious chance of defeating the Social Democrats under Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder in September's federal elections.
But this may not matter, says Patrick Ruffini, who worked on George Bush's 2004 run and is co-founder of The Next Right, an online hub for centre-right activism.
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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.
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The controversy over Klaus's re-election meant that when Petr Necas, the leader of the centre-right Civic Democrat party (ODS), was attempting to form a government after the 2010 parliamentary elections, several of his prospective coalition partners made their cooperation conditional on the new government making reform of the presidential election system part of its programme.
Reform and modernisation of Mexico's massive state-run oil company, Pemex, has been a priority of his centre-right government.
This has consisted of doing everything necessary to satisfy the League, all the while disciplining the rest of the centre-right with the threat of a League defection such as the one that brought down the first Berlusconi-led government in 1994.
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