Stage set in battle for EU soul

Germany’s Green party doubled its share of the vote in Sunday’s European parliament election, leaping into second place behind Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives and above the centre-left Social Democrats.

The far-right Alternative for Germany showed gains to 10.5% as Merkel’s party shed nine percentage points from five years ago.

But Europeans looking for signs of an expected nationalist surge will be focused on results in countries where voting ends later – notably in France and Italy.

Britain, which voted on Thursday but will publish results only after the Italians draw four days of elections across the 28-nation bloc to a close, is also expected to return a large number of anti-EU MEPs.

These may not hold their seats for long as the British negotiate to leave the union.

Such indications so far tend to bolster hopes among Brussels officials that hostile-to-Europe, populist parties may fall short of their greatest ambition to form a solid bloc of 20% of the 751-seat chamber.

That figure could, combined with milder eurosceptics, see 30% of seats held by lawmakers bent on thwarting mainstream leaders’ plans for closer EU integration. In the Netherlands, which also voted on Thursday, an upstart anti-immigration party came only fourth with 11%, according to an exit poll, having been seen as a potential winner.

The centre-left staged an unexpected comeback, helped by former Dutch foreign minister Frans Timmermans leading its EU-wide campaign.

In Austria, the party that took a lead in the renaissance of the far-right across the continent took a hammering, a projection showed.

The far-right Freedom Party crashed out of government on Tuesday when a video emerged of its leader seeking favour from a supposed Russian oligarch in return for potential public contracts.

The party scored 17.5%, some six points below where it was polling before the scandal broke.

The ruling centre-right of Chancellor Sebastian Kurz scored better by a similar margin.

But in Hungary, the eurosceptic party of Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who has led battles against Brussels over immigration and attempts to limit media and judicial freedoms, was on track to beat prevote poll expectations.

In Germany, the biggest member state and one of 21 countries that voted on Sunday, an exit poll for public broadcaster ARD showed the Greens on 22%, Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) and their conservative allies on 28%, down eight percentage points from 2014, and the SPD slumping nearly 12 points to 15.5%.

The poll for public broadcaster ARD bore out predictions of a green wave that could push environmental issues up the agenda in Brussels and bring the Greens into a possible four-party, pro-EU coalition at European level.

On a night when German political attention was focused on the CDU’s narrow defeat of Merkel’s national coalition partner the SPD in the citystate of Bremen, left-wing bastion the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) raised its share of the EU vote to 10.5%.

Initial indications showed turnout was up in most of the countries.

However this could also reflect an increasingly angry debate in many countries.

Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally is challenging for first place in France against President Emmanuel Macron’s avowedly pro-EU new party.

The anti-immigration League of Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini could find itself the biggest single party in the EU legislature if it can top the 28 seats polls indicate have been won by Merkel’s Christian Democrats and their allies.

The European parliament election will usher in weeks and possibly months of hard bargaining in Brussels over who will run EU institutions.

The parliament has insisted one of its own winning members should succeed Jean Claude Juncker as president of the executive European Commission.

But many leaders have said they will not be bound by that demand.