Socks and rock and roll in EU election campaign

BRUSSELS - With six days to go to elections, French socialists and Libertas have begun using sex to attract attention, while a rock and roll controversy has erupted in the UK.

The youth wing of the Party of European Socialists (PES) in the Haute-Loire district in France has released an online video of a couple in bed with the slogan "Need a Change?"

The pair first make love sluggishly to classical music, the man wearing socks and taking a condom from an EU blue-and-gold stars wrapper. In the second scene, the socks come off, he takes a condom from a red, PES-labeled wrapper and makes love vigorously to electronic music.

The pan-EU Libertas party in London on Thursday (28 May) hired topless model Amy Diamond to stand in front of Westminster painted in EU colours (gold stars on nipples) with a placard saying "We Demand Exposure."

Libertas needs all the help it can get in the UK, where it is polling at less than 1 percent.

The stunt refers to the expenses row in the British Parliament, which is spilling over into European politics.

Over a third of the 78 current British MEPs have hired wives, husbands or children to work in their offices, earning up to €50,000 a year, The Times reports. New EU deputies will be banned from hiring relatives, but those already employed can stay until 2014.

A study by Duisburg University in Germany shows that Italian MEPs earn the most but do the least in the EU assembly. Italian deputies currently get €150,000 a year with an attendance rate of 69 percent. French MEPs earn €63,000 on 82 percent. All MEPs will earn €92,000 from 2009 onward.

Italian candidates Giacomo Mancini (centre-right) and Rosario Crocetta (centre-left) revealed that organised crime syndicates have offered to sell them votes. The going rate is €3,000 for 2,000 votes in Bari and €400 for 500 votes in Sicily.

The centre-right is also not averse to glamour. Former French interior minister and UMP front-runner Rachida Dati has tempered her taste for catwalk fashion but continues to attract comment for wearing very high heels to EU election events.

German paper Hamburger Abendblatt notes that German centre-right candidate Gabriele Pauli last year raised eyebrows by posing in a leather outfit for a magazine.

Spanish socialist Prime Minister Jorge Luis Zapatero is honing his image by traveling to a campaign event in the Asturias province in a military jet. Interior minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba defended the move on security grounds.

The fringe French "anti-Zionist" party of comedian Dieudonne has opted for its own brand of notoriety with the support of jailed Venezuelan terrorist Illich Ramirez Sanchez a.k.a. "Carlos the Jackal," who has said the faction can count on his "symbolic vote."

Meanwhile, the British racist BNP party is in trouble for selling rock and roll CDs on its website in violation of copyright. A group of artists from bands Pink Floyd, Blur and Futureheads have written a letter of complaint to press.

New group faces malcontents

Expenses scandals aside, British Conservative party leader David Cameron is facing problems over his plans to split from the EPP-ED group in the EU parliament to create a new group with Poland's Law and Justice party.

A malcontent EPP-ED member has begun circulating a letter entitled "Cameron's Polish Six-Pack: 'PiS Artists' or serious allies?" the FT reports.

The joke plays on the fact that Law and Justice in Polish is written "Prawo i Sprawiedliwosc" and abbreviates to "PiS" - a vulgar English word for urine.

The letter names six PiS MEPs - Urszula Krupa, Jacek Kurski, Miroslaw Piotrowski, Ryszard Czarnecki, Ryszard Legutko and Zbigniew Ziobro - as examples of the party's illiberal views on the economy, gay and minority rights.

PiS head Jaroslaw Kaczynski has in Poland said the ruling centre-right Civic Platform party should also leave the EPP-ED group because of fellow EPP-EDers, Germany's CDU and CSU. The CDU and CSU parties have called for greater rights for exiled people, sparking Polish fears that exiled Germans may one day claim back lands ceded to Poland after World War II.

"I appeal to the former prime minister not to scare Polish people with Germany," Civic Platform foreign minister Radek Sikorski said.