The results are flooding in now, and it looks pretty clear that centre-right parties have won the 2009 European Parliament elections.  They seem to have done especially well in the European Union’s six biggest countries: France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain and (though official results aren’t out yet) the UK.

But spare a thought for some of the smallest and strangest parties that have also notched up a success or two. One is Sweden’s Pirate Party, which has shot to prominence because of its complaints about a crackdown on computer file-sharing among ordinary users of the internet. The Pirates have raided the Swedish political establishment and look set to carry off at least one seat in the EU parliament. Read more

Oh, dear, oh, dear.  The European Parliament has just released its first official estimate of voter turnout in the elections to the legislature, and it’s a bit of a shocker.  They reckon that a mere 43.01 per cent of eligible voters took the trouble to cast ballots.  If so, that would be the lowest on record and the seventh consecutive decline in turnout since direct elections were introduced to the European Union’s legislature in 1979.

I have sometimes heard it said around Brussels that the EU shouldn’t beat itself up about the low turnout, because the picture is pretty much the same for US mid-term congressional elections, in which voter participation has hovered at the 40 per cent mark for the past 30 years.  Does anyone question the legitimacy of US mid-term elections? Read more