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.

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?

There are several answers to that.  The first is that, yes, some people do think the low turnout for mid-term elections in the US reflects badly on American democracy.  The second is that this isn’t the whole story in the US, because voter turnout in presidential elections has recently been on the rise.  The third is that the EU should stop wasting time on arbitrary comparisons with other countries and concentrate on what action it should take to boost the legitimacy of the European Parliament, its only directly elected institution.

For, in contrast to Congress, the EU assembly does not operate like a national legislature and has never earned a place in the hearts and minds of European citizens.  Giving it more and more powers has, paradoxically, served to distance the parliament even further from the people, because it has caused more and more of the legislature’s real work to be done in committees, where television cameras disdain to go.

Meanwhile, the parliament’s plenary sessions, which are televised, can be excruciatingly painful to watch because they almost never play host to anything resembling an authentic, passionate political debate.

Every five years, well-meaning EU policymakers wring their hands in anguish over yet another fall in turnout in elections to the parliament.  Something must and will be done next time, they insist.  This year, to a certain extent, something was done: YouTube, MySpace, Twitter, MTV and God knows what else were summoned into action to bring out the vote.

What will they think of in 2014?

If one trend is emerging from the early results and exit polls of the European Parliament elections, it is that ruling political parties are in for an uncomfortable night. Voters are deserting them in droves and transferring their support either to mainstream opposition parties or to protest groups and extremists.

Put another way, voters have used the elections as a chance to state their feelings about current conditions in their respective countries. There has been nothing particularly “European” about the way they have cast their ballots.

This is especially striking in Ireland and Latvia, which - together with Hungary - are the European Union countries most seriously affected by the global financial crisis.  In Ireland, the ruling Fianna Fáil party and its Greens coalition partner have taken an absolute drubbing in local elections held simultaneously with the European vote. In Dublin, a leftist Sinn Féin candidate known for her hostile attitude to European integration looks likely to win one of Ireland’s 12 European Parliament seats.

In Latvia, which has eight seats, all but one of the ruling coalition’s five parties have been punished by voters for presiding over an economy that looks set to contract by a mind-boggling 20 per cent this year.  Meanwhile, a party representing the country’s large Russian-speaking minority has done well.

We saw a similar protest vote last Thursday in the Netherlands, where Geert Wilders and his anti-Islamic Party for Freedom scooped up four of the 25 Dutch seats in the EU legislature.

Still, we need to keep things in perspective.  Experts predicted before the election that anti-EU candidates and extreme nationalists would win about 50 seats in the 736-seat parliament.  That is the figure to keep in mind.  If it rises significantly higher than 50, then this will have been a grim night for European democracy.  If it is around 50, it will look bad, but it will mostly be a kick in the teeth for governments that have held power while the economic crisis has been at its height.

Well, that’s a good start, isn’t it?  The Netherlands was the first of the European Union’s 27 countries to release exit polls on how its citizens voted in the European Parliament elections.  And guess what?  The Party For Freedom (PVV), a right-wing anti-immigration party led by the anti-Islamic populist Geert Wilders, is expected to finish second with more than 15 per cent of the vote and at least four of the 25 Dutch seats in the EU legislature.

In truth, people outside the Netherlands shouldn’t be surprised by the PVV’s success.  Wilders has been riding high in Dutch opinion polls for quite some time.  Back in March, one survey even suggested that his party would become the biggest party in the Dutch parliament if an immediate election were held.

Over the past 10 years, the Dutch people have become increasingly doubtful about the direction in which the EU appears to be going.  Four years ago the Dutch overwhelmingly voted No in a referendum on the EU’s planned constitutional treaty.  Last April, a poll carried out by the market research group TNS NIPO showed that 60 per cent of the Dutch thought the EU institutions were a waste of public money.  

But the distinctively Dutch version of “euroscepticism” also reflects the way that Islam and immigration have surged to the front of political debate in a country that celebrates tolerance and cultural diversity, but sees them as under threat from immigrants who despise such ideals.  The spectacular political career of Pim Fortuyn, cut short when he was assassinated in the Dutch 2002 general election campaign, formed part of this picture.  So did the murder of Theo van Gogh, the film-maker killed by a radical Islamist of Dutch-Moroccan nationality in 2004.

There was a lot of popular dissatisfaction for Wilders to exploit in this European Parliament election campaign, and he did so fairly successfully.  But one should remember that the Dutch turnout was low - about 40 per cent - and the great majority of Dutch voters did not cast ballots for Wilders or other extremists.  So this is not a catastrophe for democracy.  It is, however, an embarrassment and a warning signal.

Inside Brussels: the 30 power players

Find out which 30 people matter most in the EU capital, in the FT’s guide to who really holds policy-making influence both in public and behind the scenes. Share your views below and leave us your suggestions for the 30 eurostars.

Further reading:

Latest news from Brussels

As surely as night follows day, a low turnout in this week’s European Parliament elections will be followed by the usual hand-wringing about the European Union’s “democratic deficit”.  How much longer can the EU continue as a project controlled by elites and disregarded by the masses, whose only role seems to be to wreak occasional havoc by rejecting EU treaties in referendums?  How can European political and economic integration flourish without an integrated European public opinion? Continue reading "How To Get a Better Informed European Public"