EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT: POLITICAL GROUPS CHASE AN ELUSIVE MAJORITY.

Early results from the elections show a reinforcement of the right-wing EPP group, a strengthening of Liberal group ELDR and a strong leap for the Independents and "Others" - including a number of populists and Eurosceptics - whose position according to the preliminary results will soar from 32 to 69 seats in the new Parliament. The overall make-up of the European Parliament will very much depend on the alliances forged between groups - the dominance of the EPP's fragile alliance, in particular, may be jeopardized if the Liberals and the Socialists form an grouping. Turnout for the election was at an all-time low, averaging a 44.2% (according to the EPP group) across the EU-25 and plummeting to 26.4% in the new Member States.

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EPP stays in dominant position.

With 276 seats according to the June 14 estimate, the EPP-ED is maintaining its dominance, but its composition comes out modified from the vote. The group's change of status, which was decided before the elections, confers to the European Democrats (ED) a relative weight, which was initially meant to contain the UK Conservatives in their role of troublemakers. But the latter failed, since the UK Independence Party, a faction even more Eurosceptic than their own, stole away a third of the seats it was expecting. On the other hand, the ED component will be reinforced by the arrival of the Czech ODS, President Vaclav Klaus's openly Eurosceptic party, and probably also the Allianza Nazionale, the party of Italian deputy Prime Minister Gianfranco Fini, whose named is marred by his post-fascistic political origins even though the man, a former Conventional, is now positioning himself clearly in the democratic and pro-European camp. As for the EPP itself, in spite of a slight letdown, the CDU-CSU, with 49 MEPs, remains the anchor-point to which must submit the Spanish PP, which did better than it feared after March's legislative defeat, and Forza Italia which also came out better than anticipated. The success of the ND in Greece and the PO in Poland, added to the election of EPP deputies in every EU Member States - the EPP being the only group to claim such a performance - , would have been an outright victory if the cracks which had been building for several months had not appeared concretely on the very day after the proclamation of the results.

Indeed the UDF - the French centrist party whose leader Francois Bayrou refused a fusion with Chirac's UMP movement - the Belgians of the MCC and...