Is José Manuel Barroso’s reappointment as European Commission president in trouble?  Probably not.  But the jury is still out on whether he will secure formal approval from the European Parliament as early as mid-July.  If he does not, it will be difficult to dispel the clouds of doubt that will linger over his future for two months or more.

Such uncertainty is hardly what the European Union needs at a moment when its banking system faces hundreds of billions of euros in losses this year and next, and when Germany and France, the eurozone’s two biggest economies, appear utterly at odds over when and how to rebalance their public finances.

The EU’s 27 national leaders decided unanimously at a Brussels summit last week to support Barroso’s reappointment.  It was not a legally binding decision.  They could, in theory, change it if there were massive resistance in the European Parliament.

But that’s certainly not Plan A.  Leaders such as Fredrik Reinfeldt of Sweden, which is about to assume the EU’s rotating presidency, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel want the European Parliament to hold a vote next month to confirm Barroso for a second five-year term.

Barroso’s centre-right allies, known as the EPP, are the legislature’s largest political group.  They are happy enough to hold an early vote.  But they control only 264 of the assembly’s 736 seats.  Three other groups - the socialists, centrist liberals and Greens - say they would prefer to delay the Barroso vote until September or October.

Barroso correctly sees that he must win an absolute majority - 369 votes or more - if he is not to suffer serious political injury.  If we assume that he will pick up every single EPP vote, where is he going to get the other 105 votes from?  He knows it would be fatal to turn for backing to the far-right, nationalist and anti-EU fringe elements in the legislature.

Barroso can probably count on three sources of support.  First, there is the new conservative, “anti-federalist” group led by the UK Tories.  It has 55 members (or even, as of Tuesday, 56 - a politician from Lithuania’s Polish minority appears interested in joining).  Secondly, up to half of the 80-strong liberal group in the European Parliament can surely be coaxed into supporting Barroso.  Finally, there are even some socialists - especially in Barroso’s native Portugal as well as Spain and the UK - who are inclined to back him.  All told, that should see Barroso over the 369-vote mark.

But this is not the whole story, because even some of these parliamentarians may object to holding the vote in mid-July.  In the end, this whole saga is less about Barroso’s leadership qualities than it is about the European Parliament’s desire to assert itself as one of the EU’s most powerful institutions.

“Brussels 2009″ doesn’t have quite the ring of 1641 in the English House of Commons, or 1789 in Versailles.  But the situation contains some interesting dramatic potential, that’s for sure.

Back in 1970 or so, there was a children’s Saturday morning TV show called “The Banana Splits”, in which some ludicrous character or other would frantically splutter “Hold the bus!” - always too late, for the bus would proceed on its way regardless.  It is an irresistible temptation to compare the four Banana Splits of 40 years ago - Bingo, Fleegle, Drooper and Snorky - with certain members of today’s European Parliament.

For while the legislators are busy spluttering “Stop Barroso!”, they are saying it much too late.  José Manuel Barroso is proceeding on his way to reappointment as European Commission president.  In fact, the entire episode threatens to show the European Union in the worst possible light, after EU-wide elections to the European Parliament that, with their record low turnout, were themselves not exactly a ringing endorsement of the way the EU conducts its business.

Barroso is the only declared candidate for the Commission presidency, and he has the support of national political leaders across the political spectrum - centre-right, centre and centre-left.  True, he is not seen as the most inspiring or visionary of Commission presidents.  But that is, in a sense, exactly the quality that many national leaders are looking for - and the job is in their gift, subject to the parliament’s approval.

If socialist, liberal or Green politicians in the European Parliament wanted to prevent Barroso from getting a second term, they should have fought this battle before the elections to the assembly.  Each should have rallied behind a candidate of their choice.  But they did not.  The socialists were too divided even to come up with a candidate of their own.  The opportunity was lost.  It was their own fault.

Now the socialists and Greens have the nerve to suggest that the EU’s national leaders would in some way be guilty of treating the parliament with disdain, if they were to nominate Barroso at the EU summit in Brussels on Thursday and Friday and then pass on his name to the parliament for approval.  But in truth, this is precisely the procedure set out under EU rules.

All that the average European citizen cares about is having a Commission president in office who gets on with his job.  Squabbling and muscle-flexing among European Parliament politicians who, like the Banana Splits, have missed the bus is not of the slightest interest to anyone - except perhaps the EU’s critics, who will gleefully point out that the newly elected legislators appear to have learnt no lessons whatsoever from the recent election campaign.

Richard Corbett, a well-liked British Labour MEP who won’t be coming back to Brussels, has a few harsh words for the national politicians whose shenanigans sealed his political fate. “Losing is one thing - ceding a seat to the BNP is another,” he says.

Margot Wallstrom, the Swedish commissioner in charge of communications strategy, is clear that the low turnout is not Brussels’ fault. “A hunt for someone to blame will also no doubt start and some will look to blame the Commission, which would be absurd.  The main responsibility for persuading people to vote lies with the political parties.  … It is for others to learn the lessons for the next few years.”

Jon Worth is looking ahead at the tortuous coalition-building process that now awaits. Will it be a “traffic light” alliance (red socialist, amber liberals, green greens) to stop Barroso, or a “Gabon coalition” of blue EPP, greens and liberals?

The elections did, finally, make an appearance on Twitter, at one point accounting for … 0.71 per cent of all “tweets”. Late at night on Sunday, a time in which relatively little else was happening, one guesses. It’s now back to 0.02 per cent.

Much of the blogging looked at why turnout once again anaemic:

“One trick that party politicians sometimes try and play is to say that the turnout was down, which means that you can’t read so much into the result. Pro-Europeans can’t say that because a low turnout is in itself a problem, “ says Federal Union.

“The fact remains that there are no issues which grip Europe as a demos - in other words, there are no European issues,” argues Eurosoc.

Some are already looking ahead to July, when the parliament president is picked. Here’s a Polish take on it: apparently the result is good news for Jerzy Buzek.

Who were the biggest winners and biggest losers of the European Parliament elections?

Top of the winners’ list are surely Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and President Nicolas Sarkozy of France.  Merkel’s Christian Democrats destroyed her Social Democrat coalition partners at the polls, and Sarkozy’s UMP party brushed aside the opposition French socialists.  Merkel and Sarkozy will feel vindicated in their approach to the global economic crisis, particularly as regards the need to introduce tougher financial regulation (and to lecture central banks from time to time).

Third place on the winners’ list goes to Prime Minister Donald Tusk of Poland, a moderate centre-right leader who cruised to an easy victory on the back of a resilient economy and practical pro-European policies.  Tusk’s common sense clearly appeals to the Polish electorate more than the cavalry-charging on the world stage of the previous conservative government.

Fourth place goes to Viktor Orban, leader of Hungary’s opposition centre-right Fidesz party, which annihilated the ruling socialists in an election dominated by the national economic debacle.

At the top of the losers’ list is Gordon Brown, the UK’s Labour premier, whose party finished third behind the Conservatives and the anti-EU UK Independence Party.  The disintegration of the Labour government and its seemingly inevitable replacement by a rampantly eurosceptic Tory government is now staring the rest of Europe full in the face.  It’s no exaggeration to say they are horrified.

Second place goes to Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Germany’s SPD foreign minister.  He led his party to a catastrophic defeat and must now be wondering why he agreed to stand for chancellor against the eternally popular Merkel.  Steinmeier looks more than ever like a man who was just not cut out for electoral politics in the first place.

In third place is Brian Cowen, Ireland’s prime minister, whose Fianna Fáil party has held power for 20 of the past 23 years but received an absolute drubbing at the polls because of the banking system disasters and economic collapse of the past 12 months.

The last big loser is the European Parliament itself.  In the 30 years since direct elections to the legislature were introduced, the assembly had never made a more vigorous effort to lift voter turnout.  It didn’t work.  Turnout touched a record low of 43.1 per cent.  And it wasn’t just because of “ungrateful” new member-states such as Slovakia, which has joined the eurozone but could only manage a turnout of 19.6 per cent.  There were record low turnouts everywhere from France, Greece and Italy to new member-states such as Cyprus and Lithuania.

As Martin Schulz, a prominent German socialist, pointed out, it just can’t carry on like this or the parliament’s legitimacy will one day be called into question.

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.

Coming from a completely different political direction is Hungary’s Jobbik party, a far-right outfit that looks likely to win three of the country’s 22 seats in the EU legislature. Jobbik stands for “The Movement for a Better Hungary”, but the national election commission felt compelled to declare the party’s slogan “Hungary belongs to Hungarians” unconstitutional on the eve of the European vote.

There were other far right and nationalist successes in Austria, the Netherlands and Slovakia.