L'Ombre de l'Olivier

The Shadow of the Olive Tree

being the maunderings of an Englishman on the Côte d'Azur

08 June 2009 Blog Home : June 2009 : Permalink

EU Election News

The BBC and the English media in general are reporting the predicted ZANU labour defeat - on average Labour appears to have been third, but in the "South East" region it actually came fifth. Of course they are also banging on about the far left* BNP gaining two seats and thereby somewhat ignoring the fact that both UKIP and the Tories campaigned on Eurosceptic platforms and won handily, though Mark Mardell does make this point. If there was any doubt that a UK referendum on the Lisbon treaty would result in a "No" then that doubt should now be removed. It also seems certain that the Tories and UKIP will both ensure that a referendum on it is a manifesto promise and that they will be sure to remind voters that ZANU labour lied on that issue last time around. This won't of course be the only issue in the campaign but I suspect it is going to be quite a large one since it helps both differentiate themselves from the Lib Dems as well as Labour.

It must be noted that this is the England/Wales result. In Scotland Labour seems to have done somewhat better but came second behind the SNP with the Lib Dems and Tories fighting it out for third place. On the other hand since the Tories were once upon a time considered to be dead in Scotland this is not so bad a result either.

Elsewhere in Europe Euroscepticism seems to have done less well - in Sweden, the Eurosceptic June List lost all three of its seats although one of them went to the Pirate Party which should make things interesting. Though I think the Finnish eurosceptics gained a couple of seats.

In France the socialist vote also collapsed, much as in the UK but since there is no UKIP equivalent the seats mostly went to either the governing UMP or the greens. In fact the Greens picked more seats (I think, E&OE, some results yet to be announced) than the Socialists. The far left PCF got 2 or 3 seats, the far right FN got 1 (in the South East region - i.e. Provence, Rhone, Alps + Corsica). The centrist MoDem (i.e. Beyrou & co) did even worse than the Socialists which surprised me somewhat. In the Alpes Maritimes the Socialists came a very ZANU Labour like fourth according to the Nice Matin (and MoDem came fifth):

UMP : 35.10 %

Europe Ecologie : 17.07 %

Front National : 11.21 %

Parti Socialiste : 10.73 %

MoDem : 6.22 %

*no I meant left - really I did.