While that's true, I still find it sad, how low these numbers are in general. 19% in France (2014:15%), 29% in Germany, Spain 35%, Netherlands 41%...

Not going to the elections, but then complaining about "unelected Eurocrats"...

Yeah, the interest in the europeaan elections is generally lower. Here for germany in 2014 only 49% were participating in the european election. While this time it seems like it is going up to 60% you still have to compare to our national elections, which never dropped below 70% turnout. By the way, current prognosis for germany says massive losses for the two governing parties (conservatives and social democrats) and big wins for the greens. Our neighbors in the south apparently strongly supported their main governing party ÖVP, but FPÖ (which was star of the scandalous Ibiza video) lost a lot of support.

Yeah, Eurosceptic parties had a mixed bag this year. In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders might get the worst result in his history with only 4%, and the other Eurosceptic party also only reached 11%, way below it's expectations. In Belgium however, the Vlaams Belang seems to have an historic good result, with the N-VA being the other big winner.

Question is, how the UK election will turn out - and if they will have to redo it after it got clear, that they refused about 2M votes from EU nationals, to include their votes.

N-VA is still the biggest party but they're not a 'big winner', they actually lost a few % compared to 2014. Vlaams Belang did indeed reach a historic high, after reaching their low point in 2014. I suppose this is mostly due to voters switching from VB to NVA back then, and switching back now.

The victory of VB will be most notable in the parliament here, since all other parties seem to be completely unwilling to let them in the government.

On European level, this puts eurosceptism at a record high for Belgium, but VB still won't get higher than 15% (so it's still only about the same result as in the Netherlands).

Wallonia is pretty remarkable, it seems to be one of the few places in Europe where the far right isn't able to get big.

Greens are huge this year with the under 30 folk. Very understandable, I guess.

Also, the backlash against the hard right seems to finally have curbed their rise for once. They're underperforming polls in a lot of places.

Voted for the Pirate Party, because I think they are the most likely to reverse EU's disastrous decision on copyright laws on the internet.

I hope that everyone who was unhappy with that EU decision did the same.

Because surely a lot of the people complaining about EU decisions they don't like wouldn't be stupid enough to vote in EU-sceptic facist parties into the EU rather than try to change the EU for the better.
Right? ...... Right?!?!?

Thank fucking god

Liberals + greens will likely be the kingmakers this time around.

The hard right has some staying power, but with 22% between their three groups, their influence will continue to be quite limited.

I was hoping it to be that way.

There's another reason: People actually went to vote.

Low turnout always favors the more extreme parties, as their supporters go and vote either way. On a low turnout, that makes a big part of the total votes. However, when the turnout is high, they get overshadowed by the mass of votes to the other parties, making their share of votes pretty small in the end.

That's actually untrue. Most data-points shows that high turnout usually correlates with bad results for governing or big parties. It is explainable: if people are fine with things are going, they aren't seeing a reason to vote, as things can go on as they are. If people want to change things, they go vote. And the party or parties in power are not seen as a beacon of change. This is true for this election, the two biggest blocs european peoples party (EPP, conservatives) and S&D (social democrats) lost massively. Both lost more than 30 seats, they no longer have a majority together.

It is also untrue that extremists have a stable voterbase. If you look at the actual absolute votes they get, it fluctuates a lot. This makes sense too: if your goal is to fight or end democracy it doesn't make too much sense to participate in democratic process.

This doesn't mean that with high turnout each of the smaller parties get to profit in the same way. It strongly depends which topic activates you out of non-voting. Here in germany a strong activating topic was climate change, and what do you see: the greens doubled their result from 10% to over 20%. In other countries you have different topics that activate the people. So the result differs, in some you have wins for the rights, in some for the liberals.