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The Dutch anti-immigrant maverick, Geert Wilders, scored his biggest victory yesterday, seizing 15% and second place in European elections for the Netherlands, according to exit polls last night.

The bleached blond populist, barred from Britain and facing prosecution at home for hate speech, led his Freedom party to win four of the Netherlands' 25 seats in the European parliament at the first attempt, pushing the Labour party of the coalition government's finance minister, Wouter Bos, into third place.

Wilders wants the European parliament abolished, Bulgaria and Romania kicked out of the EU, the mass deportation of immigrants from the Netherlands, and a minimum say for Brussels over Dutch policy. The virulence of his anti-Islam and anti-immigrant activities saw him barred from entering Britain earlier this year, while the Dutch authorities are prosecuting him for inciting hatred.

China strongly condemned the attacks on its foreign missions in Netherlands and Germany by Eastern Turkestan "elements" and other unidentified people, a Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang said on Tuesday.

Qin's comments came as he confirmed that the Chinese Embassy in Netherlands was attacked by Eastern Turkestan groups and a consulate in Munich of Germany by some unidentified people on Monday.

The morning after the night before, Poul Nyrup Rasmussen was either defiant or in denial. The veteran Danish centre-leftist and former prime minister heads the PES, or Party of European Socialists, that groups all the mainstream social democratic movements of the EU."To those who announce a profound crisis in European socialism", he declared yesterday, "I say no."

"Our voters stayed away. They simply didn't see the relevance of these elections. They did not see the political choices at European level ... we had a European alternative, but it was not visible enough."

"This is a meltdown for the centre-left," said Professor Simon Hix of the London School of Economics, who has been running an EU-wide poll-tracking project for the election. Hugo Brady of the Centre for European Reform said: "There is a structural crisis for the centre-left, whether they are unpopular incumbents or in opposition. They have been routed."

Seven people have been arrested in the Netherlands on suspicion of planning to blow up shops in Amsterdam.

The suspects, six men and a woman, are Dutch citizens of Moroccan origin.

District Attorney Herman Bolhaar told a news conference: "As far as we can tell, none involved has a history of terrorist involvement." One of those arrested was related to a suspect in the 2004 Madrid train bombings, he added.

Europe's mainstream centre-left parties suffered humiliation last night when four days of voting in the EU's biggest-ever election concluded with disastrous results for social democrats.

With the social democrats licking their wounds and the centre-right scoring ­victories whether in power or in opposition, the other signal trend of the ballot was the breakthroughs achieved by extreme right-wing nationalists and xenophobes.

In the EU's biggest country, Germany, returning 99 of the parliament's 736 seats, the Social Democrats (SPD), the junior partner in Chancellor Angela Merkel's grand coalition, sunk to an all-time low, with 21% of the vote.

THE EU has invited six former Soviet republics to join an eastern partnership initiative promising closer ties amid growing fears of serious economic and political upheaval in the region.

At a summit yesterday, the union offered the prospect of free trade, additional economic aid, a gradual relaxation in visa restrictions and integration into the European single market. But the initiative stops short of offering the prospect of future EU membership to any of the participants and commits them to respect human rights and democracy.

“If we don’t export stability to this region, we will import instability,” said Swedish prime minister Fredrik Reinfeldt who, along with Polish prime minister Donald Tusk, co-developed the eastern partnership plan in an attempt to stabilise eastern Europe.

The United Nations special tribunal investigating the murder of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri has reached surprising new conclusions -- and it is keeping them secret. According to information obtained by SPIEGEL, investigators now believe Hezbollah was behind the Hariri murder.

The Hariri assassination has been the source of wild speculation ever since. Was it the work of terrorist organization al-Qaida, angered by Hariri's close ties to the Saudi royal family? Or of the Israelis, as part of their constant efforts to weaken neighboring Lebanon? Or the Iranians, who hated secularist Hariri?

In late 2005, an investigation team approved by the United Nations and headed by German prosecutor Detlev Mehlis found, after seven months of research, that Syrian security forces and high-ranking Lebanese officials were in fact responsible for the Hariri murder. Four suspects were arrested. But the smoking gun, the final piece of evidence, was not found. The pace of the investigation stalled under Mehlis's Belgian successor, Serge Brammertz.

Riot police on Tuesday fired tear gas to try to break up rock-throwing Han and Uighur protesters who clashed in the capital of China's Muslim region of Xinjiang two days after bloody clashes killed 156 and wounded more than 1,000. Hundreds of protesters from China's predominant Han ethnic group, many clutching meat cleavers, metal pipes and wooden clubs, smashed shops owned by Uighurs, a Turkic largely Islamic people who share linguistic and cultural bonds with Central Asia.

Along with Tibet, Xinjiang is one of the most politically sensitive regions in China and in both places the government has sought to maintain its grip by controlling religious and cultural life while promising economic growth and prosperity.

Xinjiang has long been a hotbed of ethnic tensions, fostered by a yawning economic gap between Uighurs and Han Chinese, government controls on religion and culture and an influx of Han Chinese migrants who now are the majority in most key cities. Beijing has poured cash into exploiting Xinjiang's rich oil and gas deposits and consolidating its hold on a strategically vital frontierland that borders Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia, but Uighurs say migrant Han are the main beneficiaries.

A number of eurocrats will soon form part of an EU diplomatic corps, if European Commission President Jose Manual Barroso has anything to say about it. He's looking forward to the day when the Lisbon Treaty comes into effect -- and the EU has to build embassies.

Hundreds of bureaucrats at Barroso's European Commission, the EU's executive body, are being educated in the diplomatic arts, taking courses at universities and international academies on "Political Analysis" and "Handling the Media" to prepare for a new role that would be created under the imperilled Lisbon Treaty. Among the key provisions of the treaty is the creation of a European External Action Service and the appointment of a "foreign minister," though the title has been renamed as the "high representative of the Union," as well as an EU president. The idea is to groom an EU diplomatic service so it can start its work the day the treaty -- once known, and rejected by voters in France and the Netherlands, as the "EU constitution" -- goes into effect.

If Lisbon is ratified, it would elevate the more than 150 EU representative offices around the world to the level of embassies and consulates. The EU is also moving in advance to insure it has the space it needs. In London, EU emissaries are moving into office building on Smith Square purchased for €27 million.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran on Monday used the platform of a United Nations conference in Geneva on combating racism to disparage Israel as a “cruel and repressive racist regime,” prompting delegates from European nations to desert the hall and earning a rare harsh rebuke from Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.

As Mr. Ahmadinejad began to speak, two protesters wearing rainbow-hued clown wigs — their statement on the tenor of the proceedings — pelted him with red foam noses. Hustled out the door by security agents, they were soon followed by lines of stony-faced diplomats from the 23 European nations attending the conference. They walked out to the sound of some other delegates applauding Mr. Ahmadinejad.

The United States and more than a half-dozen other nations had already boycotted the gathering out of concern that it would focus on maligning Israel rather than on the global problems of discrimination, replaying the disputes that marked the first United Nations conference on combating racism in Durban, South Africa, in 2001.