The 2009 European Parliament elections: a disaster for Social Democrats

The day after the European Parliament elections, on 8 June, most newspapers led with the story of ‘the rise of the extreme right’. Gert Wilder’s Party for Freedom came second in the Netherlands, picking up 4 seats. The British National Party won 2 seats: the first seats they had won in a national election. A new anti-gypsy party, Jobbik, won 3 seats in Hungary, and the Danish People’s Party won 15 percent of the vote and 2 MEPs. The other big story was a new Eurosceptic group in the European Parliament – the European Conservatives and Reformists – led by the British Conservatives and Czech Civic Democrats, who broke away from the European People’s Party (EPP) to join a rag-tag band of populists, libertarians, and social conservatives from Poland, Belgium, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, and Holland. A few commentators also noticed that the Greens had done well, boosted by Dany Cohn-Bendit’s “European Greens” coalition, which won 16 percent and 14 seats in France, and the German Greens, who won 14 seats there too.