European elections 2019: LIVE results

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I hate to say it but Remain has been a complete mess and unable to sway reluctant Leavers. Change UK was a waste of time and took away resources. It was disappointing to see Scottish Remainers choose the SNP rather than the LibDems.

I think the best middle ground would involve remaining in the EU (there’s no good middle ground outside of the EU i.e. soft Brexit) but with the UK getting the original emergency break improved or some new special privilege equal to that (maybe it could be called a soft Remain?). But I think that’s not even a possibility even if the EU were willing to be more flexible because of all the bridges that have been burned by Theresa May and Alexander, who’s expected to replace her won’t help.
 
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ATraveller said:
Change UK was a waste of time and took away resources
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Completely.

They should have joined the Lib Dems from the get-go, if they’d had any sense. Projections says their presence has cost the Libs about 5 extra seats which the Brexit Party has won.

As for winning over reluctant Leavers, I’m just not sure the present polarization can be overcome that easily. Leavers and Remainers are both so firmly wedded to their respective positions. Remain is ahead in the polls largely because many people who didn’t vote last time around now would, and they’d all vote Remain, not to mention that there’s more younger voters as older voters die off. Plus some converted Leavers.

Remain sits around 53% to Leave’s 46% in this election (58% or 61% in some polls, if you include a lot of people who didn’t vote in our EU elections here, which had a lower turnout than much of the rest of Europe at 37%).

See:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1132944200079687680

www.businessinsider.com

'The people have spoken': How Remain parties beat hard Brexiteers in European elections

The combined vote share of the explicitly anti-Brexit parties was bigger than that of the Brexit Party and UKIP.
www.businessinsider.com www.businessinsider.com
While it is true that pro-Remain parties together outperformed the pro-hard Brexit parties, the European results show that the UK is bitterly divided over Brexit — and even more so than it was in the 2016 referendum.

Parties that either want to leave the EU on the hardest terms possible or instead scrap Brexit altogether got nearly 80% of the national vote when Brits went to the ballot box last week.
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The UK is a hugely divided country and that’s just it I’m afraid.

But it hasn’t helped that Remain parties couldn’t unite around a single party as with Farage vis-a-vis Brexit. That mistake will surely not be repeated going forward.
ATraveller said:
It was disappointing to see Scottish Remainers choose the SNP rather than the LibDems.
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I voted Lib Dem and we got one Scottish MEP, so I’m glad my vote contributed.

The SNP are very popular in Scotland and Sturgeon, unlike her predecessor, is a likeable person with a passionately pro-EU message.

As such, with Scottish turnout reaching tbe 50s% in places like Edinburgh (lots of young students), I knew it was inevitable that she would hoover up the Remain vote.

Doesn’t mean all those voters support independence. But they do like Sturgeon.
 
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It makes me wonder a bit too, who dropped that nail bomb in Lyons the other day. Thankfully, no one was killed and hopefully and I think I read one source, that said the injuries were not too bad.

Farage is already saying, they will contest 660 seats in the next general election and look how the party did for only being 6 weeks old.
 
In France, from the Guardian:

France: Parties of Le Pen and Macron to have the same number of seats – for now​

Official overall results Monday from France’s European voting show the parties were so close that they will both have 23 seats in the European Union legislature.
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Talk about close!
 
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Victoria33 said:
Farage is already saying, they will contest 660 seats in the next general election and look how the party did for only being 6 weeks old.
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The problem Farage will encounter with any general election is that people will vote on a wider array of issues than just Brexit. I’m not saying it won’t be important because of course it will, but there are more issues at play. His other issue is the fact that the Brexit Party doesn’t have a manifesto, so doesn’t have any workable politics at all. When it comes down to it, the Brexit Party is just the next incarnation of UKIP - as @Vouthon rightly points out, most of their success is from UKIP. It’s not completely true to say the Brexit Party have come from nowhere, as they are trying to portray.
 
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Good morning. Well, all right, good noon — it was a late night, I’m entitled to a lie-in 🙂

Brilliant night for the Lib Dems, of course, and for Greens. Liberals and Greens had a good night Europe-wide it seems. But oh, that so many have fallen for the wicked nonsense of Farage and Le Pen and Salvini and Orban and the like.

Much work ahead.

One suspects the results will not make either Labour or Conservatives eager for an early general election.
 
Lou2U said:
His other issue is the fact that the Brexit Party doesn’t have a manifesto, so doesn’t have any workable politics at all.
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Not entirely true because there’s a statement of core beliefs/values in the Party’s constitution:

2.5 The Party is a democratic, classical liberal Party and will espouse policies
which:
• promote and encourage those who aspire to improve their personal situation and
those who seek to be self-reliant, whilst providing protection for those genuinely in
need;
• favour the ability of individuals to make decisions in respect of themselves;
• seek to diminish the role of the State;
• lower the burden of taxation on individuals and businesses;
• ensure proper control over the United Kingdom’s borders;
• promote and strengthen the rule of law;
• strengthen and guarantee the essential, traditional freedoms and liberties of all people in the United Kingdom.

Which is code for the sort of social and economic, post-welfare, post-NHS, revolution that’s been a common aim of the right of the Tory Party for decades, what might be called the final stage of Thatcherism.

So, all those old Labour voters in the deprived working class communities, who have been voting for Farage to smash the ‘elites’ and get more stuff from them, have been conned. The aim is, what it’s always been, to dump them.
 
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Kaninchen said:
So, all those old Labour voters in the deprived working class communities, who have been voting for Farage to smash the ‘elites’ and get more stuff from them, have been conned. The aim is, what it’s always been, to dump them
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At least once the working class realise they’ve been conned Nigel will be able to drop the beer-drinking and get back to the claret and brandy.
 
PickyPicky said:
At least once the working class realise they’ve been conned Nigel will be able to drop the beer-drinking and get back to the claret and brandy.
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The fact that they’re going to be dumped just at the point where the destruction of manufacturing and agriculture kicks in (same plan) means that all those tax cuts will be quite safe for the long term.

So, it’ll be top of the range claret and brandy, forever.
 
PickyPicky said:
And she’s a very canny politician.
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Oh yes, undoubtedly. Sturgeon knows how to play the game and court public opinion.

She’s made a few missteps from time to time, yet compared with Corbyn, May, Boris Johnson et al she looks like a tactical genius by comparison.

Regardless, last night was a confidence boost for her leadership of the party and Scottish nation (it sure helps to make positive headlines that distract from the painful scandals surrounding former SNP leader and First Minister Alex Salmond, which has been very, very uncomfortable for Sturgeon).

She is racing ahead in polls for the Scottish Parliament and UK Parliament as well, by a country mile.
 
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@(name removed by moderator)

https://twitter.com/x/status/1132987398172872704

That’s the Alliance Party, the sister party of the Lib Dems in Northern Ireland, which is staunchly pro-EU but neither strictly Unionist nor Nationalist.

It’s candidate Naomi Long was ahead by an enormous margin:

(Please Note: This uploaded content is no longer available.)

The results from both sides of the border on the Emerald Isle have been in equal measure fascinating and encouraging.

They fit in with the wider EU pattern of liberal and Green parties doing particularly well - which just goes to show how truly Europeanized Ireland (a Eurozone country) is.

There seems to be rapid social change in Ireland which is now having ramifications for politics IMHO.
 
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Yep, a very good showing by Alliance.

Seems to me politics in the Republic is due for a shake-up. Politics dominated by two conservative parties surely can’t last for ever — although it has in the US, of course.
 
PickyPicky said:
Politics dominated by two conservative parties surely can’t last for ever — although it has in the US, of course.
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My understanding, Jharek may correct me, is that the reason for this unique political divide, not between left-and-right as in most political systems, was rooted in the ideological split left behind by the Irish Civil War in the 1920s.

It does now look like properly left-wing politics is coming to the Republic in the form of the Greens, as part of a wider EU wave.

While in Northern Ireland, the nonsectarian, pro-EU liberals are making surprisingly good gains at the expense of the old guard of unionists and nationalists.

The winds of change?
 
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Vouthon said:
My understanding, Jharek may correct me, is that the reason for this unique political divide, not between left-and-right as in most political systems, was rooted in the ideological split left behind by the Irish Civil War in the 1920s
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Yes, that’s my understanding, too. But then the Liberal/Tory split in GB was based on a historical division, but it fairly soon developed into a left-right divide of sorts.

The US system, I suppose, only started to have a coherent left-right divide after Nixon’s Southern strategy, and even so the Democrats up to now have been anchored somewhere in the centre-right.

It’s almost as though different countries are … different, isn’t it? 🙂
 
Vouthon said:
My understanding, Jharek may correct me, is that the reason for this unique political divide, not between left-and-right as in most political systems, was rooted in the ideological split left behind by the Irish Civil War in the 1920s.

It does now look like properly left-wing politics is coming to the Republic in the form of the Greens, as part of a wider EU wave.
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Sinn Fein are a strongly secular left wing party as were the PD’s who have been in government coalitions, not to mention the labour party and the SDLP and workers party in the north. There have been and are plenty of left wing parties in the Republic and NI.
 
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