Protest parties racked up gains across the 28-nation European Union in elections to the bloc’s Parliament, turning the assembly designed to unite Europe into an echo chamber for politicians who want to tear it apart.
The wave hit hardest in France,Greece and the U.K., undermining the leaders of those countries and making it more difficult to steer the EU as a whole. In all, fringe parties won 31 percent of the Europe-wide vote, up from 20 percent in the current Parliament, according to official EU projections.
The protest vote “will have a huge impact on the parties and policies back home,” said Pieter Cleppe, head of the Brussels office of U.K.-based think tank Open Europe. “They will make it harder to centralize powers in the EU, especially when it comes to managing the euro crisis.”
In France, Marine Le Pen’s National Front parlayed complaints about too many immigrants and a lenient penal system into 26 percent of the vote. The breakthrough by the National Front, which has just three out of 577 lawmakers in the national parliament, dealt a further blow to President Francois Hollande, the least popular leader in France’s modern history.
Proclaiming “politics of the French, for the French, with the French,” Le Pen said the election was a “humiliation” for Hollande. She called on him to dissolve the French parliament and submit to new national elections -- an appeal that was dismissed by Hollande’s camp.
Voters in Greece, the epicenter of the euro crisis, handed first place to Syriza, a party which chafed at the budget cuts demanded by German-led creditors in exchange for international aid. A near-final count gave it 26.6 percent. Prime Minister Antonis Samaras’s New Democracy party, which has a two-seat majority in the national parliament, trailed with 22.7 percent.
Samaras’s junior coalition partner, Pasok, got 8 percent, keeping the ruling parties on top and avoiding an electoral embarrassment. Samaras is now counting on an easing of terms for the repayment of Greece’s debt. Expectations that he will stay in power buoyed Greek bonds today, pushing the 10-year yield down 27 basis points to 6.23 percent at 3:25 p.m. in Athens.
The 751-member European assembly will have a voice in naming the next president of the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm. On that point, the mainstream parties still hold sway. The latest count gave center-right parties 214 seats, leading their standard-bearer, former Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker, to claim the commission post. The Socialists, led by Germany’s Martin Schulz, got 189 seats. A deal between the two political groups may be the only avenue to a majority.
Source: Bloomberg
