“With a seat in Brussels largely viewed as a sidetrack or a retirement post, the parties don’t put their A team on the MEP election lists. Voters react accordingly.”

Another factor, as reported in much of the news about the elections, is that candidates were usually making a running on domestic, not European issues. That parochialism is hugely significant for it suggests, I believe, that both the candidates and their electorates believed that whoever was elected could expect to have little influence on the course of European policy so their role is only to gather information from the power centre in Brussels and articulate local concerns there. If so, that could also help to explain both the low level of interest in the elections and the increasingly pervasive disenchantment with the European project.

Most generalisations about politics have their exceptions, of course, and the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) certainly did focus on European issues. By its own account, it is committed to negotiating an “amicable divorce” between the EU and the UK or, as one of their high-profile elected candidates, Mr Robert Kilroy-Silk, put it: Wrecking the European Parliament - at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3803599.stm

As I was a bit interested and not able to find these statistics anywhere else, I had to calculate them. As I think the bloggers and readers on this site might be interested I will post it here:

This last EU-parliament (seats and percentage of seats):
EPP PES ELDR EUL GREENS UEN EDD NI Total
294 232 67 55 47 30 17 44 786
37,4 29,5 8,5 7,0 6,0 3,8 2,2 5,6 100
http://wwwdb.europarl.eu.int/ep5/owa/p_meps2.repartition?ipid=0&ilg;=EN&iorig;=home&imsg;=

The elected EU-parliament (seats and percentage of seats):
EPP PES ELDR EUL GREENS UEN EDD NI Total
276 200 67 39 42 27 15 66 732
37,7 27,3 9,2 5,3 5,7 3,7 2,0 9,0 100

http://www.elections2004.eu.int/ep-election/sites/en/results1306/graphical.html

So, for all the local hubbub about this party winning and that losing in the big picture almost nothing happened. The partygroupless group got bigger, but won´t some of those parties join groups now that they been elected?

Isn´t this a remarcable result? And what does it say?

With confusion from sweden

Morten, to me it says that even though incumbent parties mostly lost (with some exception in Spain and a couple other places), the governments across the EU are distributed enough left-right that both sides lose and gain, and the net is very hard to see. Right-of-center incumbents lose in Denmark, France and Italy; left-of-center incumbents lose in Germany, UK; these come close to cancelling out. Also, proportional representation and party lists mean that major changes in the makeup are even harder to achieve.

Thanks for crunching the numbers!

The aggregate numbers also show that very little change in the totals can co-occur with substantial national swings. People perceive the national results, and they have a point as far political reality is concerned. It would be absurd to take the aggregate result as a legimitation for conservative policies to be applied across the EU. Countries that have voted social-democrat would revolt. I think the result means that uniform EU-wide trends are highly unlikely in general, and probably coincidental when they occur. This means that the EU parliament must be made ’diversity-proof’: if it wants to contribute to a harmonious EU, it must respect the diversity on the national level and must not rely on its aggregate fraction strength to ’rule the continent’. A case against mandatory deep political integration in the near future.

You hit the nail on the head with PO (Platforma Obywatelska): centrist right, with a progressive (read: ProEU) outlook. LPR are very much right-wing, swearing by Thacherite economics and a preservation of “family values”. Third were PiS (Prawo i Sprawiedliwosc: Law and Justice), who seem slightly centrist-right, but I’m not too familiar with their policies. We can only thank the lazy non-voters for placing Samoobrona fourth (and thank we will!!) and blame LPR’s high place on their very militant voters. LPR encourage their supporters to vote right after Sunday mass and, as most of LPR supporters tend to be fervent Catholics, they do. All in all, it’s not great, but it could have been much, much worse. I wish UW (Unia Wolnosci) would place higher…I think Geremek is fantastic.

So what does Unia Wolnosci stand for?

Freedom Union or Union of Freedom. :)

Actually I meant what are their policies, what do they believe in? Apologies.

Sorry, David. My bad.

UW are liberals who advocate free market economy. Their roots are quite deep in the Solidarity movement of the 1980s (Geremek was one of the “inteligentsia” involved at the time). They are very pro-European and their outlook is quite progressive. Unfortunately, they are seen by the average Pole as being basically too well educated (Intelligentsia for the intelligent, a friend described it). It’s a shame, because I think their progressive, pro-European but still esentially Polish policies are just what the country needs.

Slightly more info here:http://www.fact-index.com/u/un/unia_wolnosci.html

both the candidates and their electorates believed that whoever was elected could expect to have little influence on the course of European policy so their role is only to gather information from the power centre in Brussels and articulate local concerns there - and of course they were quite right to believe that.

The problem is that the only people who vote on “European” issues per se are the Eurosceptics, who are therefore the most motivated in a low turnout election. The non-sceptic parties would be much better to run better-known personalities who can attempt to capture the public imagination. (Closed list electoral systems make this much more difficult.)

The weird thing is that 90% or more of MEPs work very hard, but the results of their labour is barely visible even in Brussels, let alone at home.