Setback for govt parties, far-right spectre haunts EP elections
Established parties yesterday found themselves struggling in their quest for European Parliament seats as recession-hit voters turned to protest parties or failed to cast ballots at all in elections.
Voters in 19 European Union countries went to the polls on the fourth and final day of an election in which some 375m people in 27 states were eligible to cast ballots.
Germany’s ruling Christian Democrats slipped back with the centre-right CDU-CSU alliance of Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, set to win 38% of the vote, down from 44% in 2004, according to exit polls. Her Social Democrat coalition partners were expected to achieve roughly the same result as in 2004 – 21%.
The liberal Free Democrats – Merkel’s preferred government partners after next September’s national election – were projected to score 10%, up from 6% in 2004.
Governments in many countries, especially the UK, where Gordon Brown, prime minister, is struggling for his political life, anticipated punishment at the hands of voters angry and frightened at Europe’s worst recession since the 1930s.
“The results are going to be terrible. There’s no point beating about the bush on that,” Peter Hain, Mr Brown’s secretary of state for Wales, told Sky News. “Terrible for Labour and, I suspect, terrible for all the mainstream parties.”
Pollsters predicted a surge in support for the anti-EU UK Independence party, partly thanks to an expenses scandal that has shattered public trust in members of parliament.
Across Europe, evidence of anti-government protest votes appeared in Ireland, where the ruling Fianna Fáil party appeared in danger of losing its European parliament seat for the Dublin area, and in Latvia, where an opposition party representing Russian-speakers made strong gains.
In Austria, a group led by MEP Hans-Peter Martin, a journalist who campaigns against corruption in the European parliament, was set to take 18% of the vote.
Two far-right parties were on course to win a combined 17.5%. In neighbouring Slovakia, the ultra-nationalist SNS party was poised to claim its first seat in the EU legislature.
Voters in Italy today cast their ballots against a background of unabated sexual controversy surrounding the prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi. At noon, the turnout was more than 3% below the figure at the same point in the 2008 ballot. Low turnouts in Italy tend to favour the left.
It was notable that the highest levels of abstention were mostly in regions that traditionally favour the right, possibly suggesting conservative Catholic voters had registered their disapproval by staying away.
Geert Wilders’ populist, anti-Islamic Party for Freedom finished second in the Netherlands and seized four of the 25 Dutch seats in the parliament.
EU policymakers were hoping that this election, the seventh to the European parliament, would reverse an unbroken trend of declining voter participation ever since direct elections to the legislature were introduced in 1979.
First signs were that the turnout would be close to the 45.7% recorded in the 2004 elections. In France, 14.8% of voters had cast ballots by midday, up from 13.7% in 2004.
But Nicolas Sarkozy’s ruling centre-right UMP tonight claimed a massive victory as early projections put the party at 28%, far ahead of the beleaguered Socialist party, whose predicted 16% marked a humiliating loss of seats in the European parliament. The other big winners of the night were the greens: the Europe Ecologie coalition, headed by the former May 1968 student leader and Europe veteran Daniel Cohn-Bendit was predicted to come third, less than 1% behind the Socialists.
In Slovakia, turnout was a wretched 19% – but it was slightly up on 17% five years ago. Malta’s turnout was 79%, slightly down from 82%.
EU officials say a low turnout is disappointing because the parliament is poised under the bloc’s Lisbon treaty to win even greater powers. But they console themselves with the thought that turnout in US mid-term congressional elections over the past 30 years has hovered around 40%.
The level of invective in the Hungarian campaign has been more than disturbing, with fringe neo-fascists looking for an election breakthrough and sparing no one’s blushes. The top candidate for Jobbik, the neo-fascist party, scraped the barrel in the final days ahead of the vote.
“So-called proud Hungarian Jews should go back to playing with their tiny little circumcised tails,” said Christina Morvay, who may well win a seat in Strasbourg and Brussels.
Apart from the focus on whether a seat is won by Jobbik, which boasts black-shirted paramilitaries and has the large Roma minority trembling with fear, the broader picture is one of government meltdown and a landslide victory for the main rightwing opposition, Fidesz.
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