"There has been nothing like it since Harold Macmillan's Night of the Long Knives," wrote the London Times on Monday, reporting on British Prime Minister Tony Blair's surprising cabinet reshuffle last week  that sent aftershocks through not just British politics but also Europe and the Middle East. (On Britain's "Night of the Long Knives," in 1962, former Prime Minister Harold Macmillan sacked half a dozen high-ranking ministers.) Blair sacked only one top minister, but he shifted around so many others that observers in Europe are writing in terms of "desperation" and a his eventual exit from power. But on Monday, Blair still refused to set a date for his planned departure from Downing Street before the next general election.

After his Labour Party suffered a damning local-election loss on May 4, Blair rearranged his cabinet to signal that he intends to renew his government. Loyalists were promoted, but some heavyweights -- including Foreign Secretary Jack Straw -- were moved to less important roles. Now a new foreign secretary, Margaret Beckett, will have to brush up on the Iranian nuclear crisis ahead of a special meeting in New York on Monday with ministers from five other nations to discuss the problem.

English papers have wondered if Jack Straw's public ridiculing of alleged US plans to attack Iran  had something to do with his demotion to Leader of the Commons. Iran, in any case, has followed the story. Tehran's foreign minister mocked the Labour election loss by saying on Sunday: "The people's vote showed their opposition to Mr Blair's policies of following those of the United States."

German papers roughly agree. The center-right Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung writes that a recent tragedy for British soldiers -- the downing of a British helicopter in Basra -- underlines a deteriorating security situation in Iraq, which translates to a deteriorating political situation for Blair. "More and more British people are asking themselves what their soldiers … can and should accomplish in Iraq," writes the paper. "Blair's credibility has been heavily damaged on the battlefield, and his charisma has been sacrificed to the endless little war."

The center-left Süddeutsche Zeitung concentrates on Margaret Beckett. She isn't the most diplomatic choice for a diplomat, the paper notes: "Cold and aloof, undiplomatically direct and offensively arrogant, the 63-year-old has so far been considered a classic Labour apparatchik." Her colleagues from America, Russia, China, France, and Germany at the Monday-night meeting on Iran will greet her "with a mixture of curiosity and skepticism," since it isn't clear why Blair would have picked his former environment minister as Britain's chief diplomat. "The most plausible reason seems to be that the prime minister wants to ensure his own control over British foreign policy by naming an inexperienced but loyal party soldier."

The left-wing Berliner Zeitung draws parallels to previous prime ministers. "After nine years in office, Blair is showing the same paranoia that his predecessors Margaret Thatcher and Harold Macmillan once demonstrated. Anyone who contradicts the Great Leader gets ousted. Experienced ministers like Jack Straw and onetime Defense Minister Geoff Hoon (demoted in 2005, and again last week) are degraded like stupid schoolboys." But the paper believes Blair isn't quite in his last throes as prime minister, like Thatcher and Macmillan. Labour leaders may be asking for a date for Blair's resignation -- and handover of power to his Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, a shift Blair promises before the next general election -- but he can still "choreograph his own fate." He could, for example, pass the baton to Brown at Labour's annual party conference in September. "He would have to give up his dream of celebrating a 10th anniversary in 10 Downing Street, but he would leave as a dignified statesman … His party would thank him for the sacrifice."

--Michael Scott Moore, 12:30 p.m. CET

Poland Forges a Hard-Right Coalition

The good news is that Poland has a government: Six months after parliamentary elections swept the right-wing Law and Justice Party to power -- led by the famous, chubby Kaczynski twins -- long negotiations have resulted in a cabinet and a ruling coalition. The bad news is that the latest politicians named to cabinet posts are far-right populists who have been known to make noises against Germans, foreign capital, the European Union and Jews. Andrzej Lepper, a former pig farmer and a leader of the farm-based Self-Defense Party, will serve as Poland's agricultural minister, while Roman Giertych, head of the League of Polish Families, will be education minister. Their small parties joined the ruling coalition, and Poland's Foreign Minister, Stefan Meller, resigned in protest. European diplomats as well as German newspapers reacted on Monday with alarm.

"The Polish government has now moved even further to the right," according to the lead editorial in the center-left Süddeutsche Zeitung. "It remains to be seen whether these two nationalist maniacs, Lepper and Giertych, will let themselves be disciplined and neutralized by their new responsibilities in the cabinet." In any case, an angry or defensive Polish government won't find many friends in the EU. "There just aren't the means (in Warsaw) for 'self-confident politics' against Russia and every other European state," the paper writes. "Poland can threaten its neighbors only with deadlock and petty destruction -- but then it risks isolation in the EU, which would mean losing fights for its portions of the EU budget."

The paper thinks popular support for Lepper and Giertych is low. "Troublemakers have always remained marginal figures in Polish politics," the commentator writes. "The Polish public is traditionally resistant to attempts to make it toe the party line -- something Giertych, whose motto as education minister is 'patriotic education,' seems to want."

The left-wing daily Die Tageszeitung thinks Poland is just reaping what it sowed by voting last year for the Kaczynski brothers. The twins -- one as president of Poland, the other as leader of Law and Justice -- "have talked about harsh new laws and even a 'super police force' intended to cleanse Poland of its enemies under the auspices of an 'Anti-Corruption Office.'" Corruption scandals in a ruling center-left coalition gave the Polish right its momentum last year, and the taz writer describes how the Kaczynski twins have summed up the evil threatening Poland in a simple cartoon image: "The 'Uklad' (or 'ruling system,' in Polish) is a sort of evil octopus that spreads lies and deception, destroys morality, and has sex with little kids." Not only corrupt Polish politicians belong to the Uklad, writes the taz, but also "the rich … the successful businessmen and foreigners who want to 'sell out' Poland, the EU and its bureaucrats, the Jews, the Germans and so on." The writer gives no specific analysis of Lepper and Giertych, but worries that this populist-right push to clean up Poland will declare democracy itself an enemy, along with "the left, the unions, a free press and the independent courts."