Although summer may (belatedly) have arrived in Brussels, Shakespeare’s “Now is the winter of our discontent” may be a more appropriate apothegm — at least for Europe’s voters, if the results of last week’s European parliamentary elections are anything to go by.
In what was the second biggest democratic exercise on the planet — some 400 million people were eligible to cast their vote for a new European Parliament — the estimated 43.1 percent of eligible European voters that went to the polls across the European Union have returned a very different set of representatives to the bloc’s parliament.
From the perspective of Europe’s mainstream parties, at least, things did not go quite according to plan. Indeed, although mainstream politics still predominate, there were significant gains for euroskeptic and populist parties across the political spectrum in many of Europe’s 28 member states, with notable success for France’s far-right Front National and the United Kingdom’s UKIP.