Last weekend, the European Union’s electorate of more than 400 million went to the polls to elect 720 members of the European Parliament. There are seven political groups representing dozens of parties, plus 100 MEPs who belong to no faction, so drawing conclusions from the results is an intricate task.

Two developments dominated the elections: the surge of the far-right in some parts of the EU but not in others, and the relative buoyancy of the center-right.

Europe is experiencing a populist surge. Parties dubbed “far-right” have won enough support to form or support governing coalitions in Italy, Sweden, the Netherlands, Finland and Croatia, while others have grown in popularity in France, Germany, Portugal, Belgium and Austria. Every country has its own story and its individual context, but a common thread is the rising level of migration, particularly from the Middle East and North Africa. This combined with the fragile economic landscape following the pandemic to create substantial, and exploitable, voter anxiety.

Radical change is not at first obvious from the headline results of the elections. The largest group in the European Parliament remains the center-right European People’s Party (EPP), home to Germany’s Christian Democrats and the People’s Party of Spain, and overall it lost only a single seat. The moderate left-wing Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats — the Social Democratic Party of Germany, the Dutch Labour Party, the French Socialists and their like — sustained more losses and is now 51 seats behind the EPP. The........

© The Hill