Preliminary election results: Högervåg in Europe

Far-right parties are making strong progress in the EU elections. French Marine Le Pen’s National Rally party could be the largest in the EU Parliament, preliminary results show.

In Germany, the far-right AFD becomes the second largest party after the conservative CDU/CSU, despite an election campaign marked by scandals.

At the same time, it is clear that the Christian-democratic conservative party group EPP, which includes the Swedish Moderates and Christian Democrats, will continue to be the largest party group in the EU Parliament.

The president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, declares herself the winner in the EU elections, where both the right and the far right are advancing.

Today is a good day for EPP. We won the EU elections, my friends. From tomorrow we will work for Europe, for European citizens and we will deliver, says European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, according to the Euractiv news site.

We are the anchor of stability, she believes.

According to the forecast from the parliament, her Christian-democratic conservative party group EPP – which also includes Sweden’s M and KD – will provisionally receive 189 seats in the incoming parliament.

The outside grows

The far right is growing at the same time. SD’s party group, the EU-skeptic conservative ECR, gets 72 seats, while Marine Le Pen’s ID lands on 58. In addition, there is a large number of far-right seats even among the unaffiliated and the parties that have not yet announced which party group they want to sit in.

The great uncertainty, however, concerns how the various far-right parties will form and who are willing to cooperate with each other. For example, the German AFD was recently thrown out of the ID group after several scandals surrounding the top candidate Maximilian Krah.

Stable in the middle?

If the EU Parliament’s calculations of the results come true, the three center groups – conservative EPP, liberal RE and social democratic S&D – will get a good majority with 404 of the 720 mandates. This enables a fairly stable majority behind von der Leyen as chairman of the European Commission.

However, much depends on how Germany and France will act. S-rated German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and liberal French President Emmanuel Macron have recorded stinging defeats for their parties in the election.