THE JUNE MOVEMENT: a Danish political party of moderate Euroskeptics not afraid to team up with fat Greek fascists

Jens-Peter Bonde (http://www.bonde.com/), whose 59th birthday was yesterday, is an MP in the EU from Denmark, and the sole remaining elected member of the June Movement, the Euroskeptic Danish political party, since 2004 when two other MPs from the party were not re-elected. Bonde's websites -- he has one in both English and Danish -- show him to be a believer in open government, and he really tries to explain what he does by blogging about it every few days. I don't know if he writes this himself, the politicians here in the U.S. usually don't write their own blogs, but you get the sense that it's his voice. He has written a number of books in both English and Danish in which he explains the E.U. constitution, a couple of these you can also download from his website.

The June Movement takes its name from the month of June in 1992, when there was a referendum on the Maastricht treaty -- which was the treaty that led to the creation of the European Union. Denmark in this referendum rejected the treaty (by a slim majority), and this was the rallying point for the people who founded the party two months later. Denmark actually did sign the treaty less than a year later, after a few concessions had been made (for instance Denmark still does not use Euros, they still use the Danish Kroner.) The party doesn't want the EU to have so much power over the sovereign nations, they just want the EU to be a merely reactive force that responds to the orders of the member countries.

'Euroskeptic' is a rather broad term, for in the case of other parties in other European contries, it can mean they don't want any kind of EU at all, or they want certain limits on it, which can vary. In 2004 the June Movement joined The Independent and Democracy Group, a coalition of these sorts of parties from different countries. Some of them are real nasties, like piggish nationalist and anti-semite Georgios Karatzaferis of the Popular Orthodox rally of Greece. In 2005, many left the June Movement because of these associations.

The month of June is when people pick strawberries in Scandanavia, and that's also the symbol of the party.