Voters seek new blood in fractured EU
Traditional centrists denied a majority as Greens gain ground
Europeans dealt a blow to the continent’s traditional centreleft and centre-right politicians in elections for the European Parliament, depriving them of a majority for the first time in favour of a fractured slate of pro-European Union MPs, with small gains for the far-right.
Voters turned out in droves — the highest participation in 25 years — for the opportunity to take a shot at the parties that have steered Europe’s consensus-driven policies for decades.
Far-right leaders were on track for their best Europe-wide result ever, but it was only an incremental gain over their result from 2014, suggesting that despite years of tumult, voters might not be ready to give up on the EU, or to embrace leaders who want to weaken it from within.
Voters boosted Greens and other pro-EU leftists, showing that voters who abandoned traditional parties were searching for new blood, but not a full-scale political revolution.
The vote followed a tumultuous period for the 28-nation EU. In the five years since the last elections for European Parliament, the continent has been rocked by repeated terrorist attacks, a refugee crisis, Britain’s decision to leave the bloc and the lingering pain of the global financial crisis.
In Britain, which voted despite plans to leave the bloc in October, eurosceptic leader Nigel Farage with 32 per cent for his Brexit Party repeated his 2014 poll-topping performance. The results add to the woes of Prime Minister Theresa May's Conservative Party, which just forced her to resign as party leader.
In France, far-right leader Marine Le Pen bested President Emmanuel Macron’s party in a repeat of her 2014 win.
She delighted in what she called “the erasure of the old parties” and said the vote “confirms the new divide between nationalism and globalisation.” But her
23.5 per cent vote share was lower than it was in 2014, a warning sign that she might have hit a ceiling.
With more than 400 million eligible voters, the European Parliament elections are the second-largest exercise in democracy in the world, behind India’s national elections. After decades of slipping participation, turnout this year was sharply higher — 50.5 per cent, up from 42.6 per cent in 2014. The spike indicated new passions — and new anxieties.
The mixed results echoed across Europe, where far-right campaigners built momentum in opinion polls and delivered modest results. In the Netherlands, one far-right party supplanted another, with no overall gain. In Germany, the anti-immigration Alternative for Germany party won a smaller share than it did in national elections in 2017.
Across the continent, eurosceptic forces captured about 24 per cent of the legislature’s 751 seats, initial results indicated, up only slightly from 2014, when they captured 22 per cent.
The biggest wellspring of far-right support appeared to be Italy, where Interior Minister Matteo Salvini’s League party vaulted into first place after a year in which he campaigned across the country on a fierce platform of turning back migrants and weakening the EU.
But his plans for a European-wide raid of fellow eurosceptics will now have to be scaled back. Most of his potential partners made small gains, if any. They were never expected to take a majority of Parliament; now it’s unlikely they’ll be strong enough to be a blocking minority.
Instead, Greens and other proenvironment, socially liberal parties might have been the surprise of the election, surging to second or third place in France, Germany, Finland and elsewhere.
The result is a European Parliament in which the centrist parties failed to reach a majority for the first time, and will have to draw support from MPs with less orthodox views of how to run Europe. The centrists dropped from 53 per cent of Parliament to 43 per cent.
In Germany, where the Greens surged to second place, according to initial results, party co-leader Robert
Habeck told broadcaster ARD that concern for the planet’s future had “played a dominant role” in the campaign, and that voters were punishing the Government for its “hesitancy” in confronting the issue.
The legislature has a voice in some of the biggest issues facing the EU. It approves senior EU officials, signs off on Europe’s massive budget and delves into gritty lawmaking, as in the sweeping data privacy rules that went into effect last year and whose reach extends far beyond European borders.
In Italy, the Western European country that has most clearly thrown its support behind populism and the far right, the projected results confirmed the rise of Salvini’s League.
Projections suggested that the League had earned 32.3 per cent of the Italian vote, doubling its showing in last year’s national elections. Those results, well ahead of other far-right parties in a Pan-European coalition, figure to bolster Salvini’s role as a nationalist torchbearer inside the bloc.
In France, the vote was seen as a referendum on the leadership of Macron, who came to power in 2017 with an avowedly pro-European agenda.
Macron’s popularity has plummeted since his election, notably in the ongoing “yellow vest” protest that portrays the young president as out of touch with the concerns of ordinary people. But the results were not the crushing defeat for Macron some had predicted. He finished a single percentage point behind Le Pen.
In Germany, the electorate split among smaller parties, with the two governing parties that have traditionally dominated the country’s politics appearing to continue their downward slide.
Chancellor Angela Merkel’s centreright Christian Democrats were comfortably ahead in forecasts. But the party appeared to have fallen about 7 percentage points from the last vote in 2014. Losses were far heavier for Merkel's long-suffering coalition partners, the centre-left Social Democrats, who appeared to have fallen to third place. The far-right Alternative for Germany Party took just over 10 per cent, below the nearly 13 per cent the party captured in the last national election in 2017.