NZ HERALD 27 MAY 2014: EUROPEAN UNION SHAKEN AS FRINGE PARTIES GAIN VOTES

The principles underpinning the European Union are now an open target after parties campaigning against the euro, immigration and loss of national sovereignty scored spectacular gains in elections to the European Parliament. In a vote marked by a near-record low turnout, groups that mainstream parties once ridiculed as lunatic or a joke delivered a message of public disenchantment with the European project and a far-right jolt to politics in their own capitals. The so-called eurosceptics picked up around a sixth of the 751 seats to the Strasbourg-based assembly, according to exit polls and results issued yesterday after balloting among 380 million voters in the EU's 28 countries. The biggest shock came in France, where the National Front was estimated to have a quarter of the vote, by far its best-ever showing at national level, which would earn it a third of the country's 74 seats. The conservative UMP was credited with around a fifth of the vote, while President Francois Hollande's Socialists trailed an abysmal third, with around 14 per cent. "Our people demand only one sort of politics - the politics of the French people, for the French people and with the French people," said Marine Le Pen, daughter of the party's firebrand founder Jean-Marie Le Pen. "They have declared they no longer want to be ruled from the outside, to have to bow to laws they did not vote for, or to kowtow to [EU] commissioners who are not subject to the legitimacy of universal suffrage." In Britain, which voted on Friday, the UK Independence Party (UKIP) was ahead of the governing Conservatives and opposition Labour Party. UKIP leader Nigel Farage described the breakthrough as an "earthquake". He said: "Never before in the history of British politics has a party seen as an insurgent party ever topped the polls to a national election". In Denmark, the anti-immigrant Danish People's Party won around 23 per cent of the vote, enough to gain three of the country's 13 seats, according to pollsters. In Germany, Alternative for Germany, a small party demanding a return to the deutschmark and the end to German bailouts for debt-stricken EU countries, scored above the 5 per cent threshold needed to gain seats. But Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservatives were comfortable winners, and in Italy, the anti-establishment Five Star Movement did well but was outpaced by Prime Minister Matteo Renzi's centre-left Democratic Party. The Parliament will remain in the control of the two mainstream centre-right and centre-left parties that are solidly behind European integration and have co-dominated the assembly for decades. Estimates gave the two blocs 212 and 186 seats respectively. But the hefty protest vote will be seen not only as a sign of anger towards unpopular national governments but also as hostility towards Brussels, battling a reputation for being smug, bureaucratic or dictatorial. Many countries remain in the grip of an economic slump. The EU counts 26 million unemployed, and in some regions more than one in two of the under-25 population of working age is without work. Even in Greece, which is surviving thanks to EU bailouts, the big gainers yesterday were the anti-austerity left-wing Syriza Party and the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn. READ MORE AT: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=11262230