Europe was leaning to the right ahead of European Parliament elections Sunday, with voters in many countries favoring conservative parties against a backdrop of economic crisis.

Opinion polling showed right-leaning governments with edges over their opposition in Germany, Italy and France. Conservative opposition parties were tied or ahead in Britain, Spain, and some smaller countries.

So how big is the right expected to win? In the 17th paragraph, after we've been told "the Europe-wide elections were most important as a snapshot of national political sentiment," we finally get some numbers:

An informal forecast by the political science website http://www.predict09.eu anticipated Conservatives winning 262 seats against 194 for the Socialists and 85 for the Liberals in 736-seat European Parliament, roughly the same proportions as in the last parliament.

And then the article notes that "right-leaning parties have taken up business regulation and social protection initiatives more traditionally associated with the left."

When you look at the site that AP references--which turns out to be a project of the PR group Burson-Marsteller--it turns out that its actual prediction is for slight gains for the left. (On the chart on the site's main page, the left parties are in red, pink and green; the centrist Liberal parties are in yellow; the conservative parties are in blue and light blue; and the far-right parties are in orange and gray.) The main change the PR group predicts is that the left parties will take a slightly larger slice of the pie and the Liberal parties will have a slightly smaller one.

Of course, it's the actual voting results that matter, not the predictions, and it's certainly possible that the European right actually will make major gains. But when the AP takes forecasts that Conservatives will do about as well as they did last time after moving their platforms to the left, and depicts that as evidence of "Europe...leaning to the right," that would seem to say more about the news service's political sentiments than about Europe's.

The article and accompanying chart imply that Europe is delaying an inevitable adjustment. The case is far from clear, in spite of the NYT's best effort to make the case. The chart shows that Europe produces about 18 million cars a year, while North America produces around 12 million. Those noting the asterisk will see that one-third of the cars in North America are produced in Canada or Mexico, meaning that only about 8 million cars are produced in the U.S. This adjustment makes the gap in employment look less extreme.

Furthermore, the U.S. imports a large portion of the parts for the cars that are produced here. Much of the employment in the auto sector is in parts production. Without knowing the balance of trade in car parts, there is no easy way to know how Europe's auto employment relative to its output compares to the U.S.

But such pesky realism has never gotten in the way of the neocon idealism U.S. media routinely try to push upon sometimes recalcitrant Europe; see FAIR's magazine Extra!: "Europe Says No--to Pundits’ Advice: 'Painful Reforms' Find Few Takers" by Seth Ackerman (9–10/05)