The mainstream center-right parties, including Mr. Reinfeldt's, the Moderates, acknowledged the importance of welfare, too.
Mainstream center-right parties like Britain's Conservatives and France's Union for a Popular Movement cannot afford complacency either.
No, the shutdown is the result of the divide between mainstream, center-right Republicans and Tea Party extremists.
Even if Mr. Monti were to decide to run, it is unclear what party he would ally with, since Italy lacks a mainstream center-right.
With few exceptions, Europe's mainstream center-left parties, which long positioned themselves as defenders of society's most vulnerable, are taking it in the teeth politically.
Mr. Cameron upset Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany even before he took office by taking the Conservatives out of the mainstream center-right political family in the European Parliament to form a euroskeptical fringe group with Czech and Polish rightists.
Dimitar Bechev, senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said Fidesz was causing concern because it was a mainstream center-right party that was moving "in a more radical direction".
It took 3.3 percent of the vote in Greece's legislative elections that year, while the country's mainstream center-right and center-left parties won 86 percent of the vote between them.
The Socialist Party, which in recent months has been trying to transform itself into a mainstream center-left party, made surprise gains, winning nearly 8percentt of the vote.
But such have been the alarms in Europe recently over the rising influence of the anti-immigrant far-right that mainstream center-right governments have been forced to promise tougher immigration measures.
Now that the diplomacy is over, the fissures among France's political elite are beginning to open, particularly in the ruling UMP, the party created from the mainstream center-right groups that won last June's general elections.
