German And Dutch Exit Polls Suggest A Shift To The Hard Right As Voting In EU Elections Nears An End

Tens of millions across the European Union were voting in EU parliamentary elections on Sunday in a massive exercise of democracy that is expected to shift the bloc to the right and redirect its future.

BRUSSELS (AP) — The first major estimates coming out of the European Union parliamentary elections Sunday suggest that the hard right will rise in the legislature despite a series of scandals in Germany, the bloc’s biggest nation.

The exit poll in Germany indicated that the Alternative for Germany, or AfD, rose to 16.5% from 11% in 2019 beating the Social Democratic party of Chancellor Olaf Scholz, which fell to 14%. The combined result for the three parties in the German governing coalition barely topped 30%, with the Greens taking heavy losses. The poll comes on the heels of major gains for the far right in the Netherlands, where the party of Geert Wilders is in a neck-and-neck race with a Socialist-Green alliance.

Even though polling will continue in Italy until late in the evening and many of the 27 member states have not yet released any projections, the indications confirmed what earlier surveys and analysists had predicted: the EU’s massive exercise in democracy is expected to shift the bloc to the right and redirect its future.

The war in Ukraine, migration, and the impact of climate policy on farmers are some of the issues weighing on voters’ minds as they cast ballots to elect 720 members of the European Parliament.

Surveys suggest that mainstream and pro-European parties will retain their majority in parliament, but they will lose seats to hard right parties like those led by Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni, Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands and Marine Le Pen in France.