Europeans start voting on Thursday in four days of elections to the EU parliament that will influence not just Brussels policy for the next five years.
Matteo Salvini’s League may pip the Christian Democrats of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the bloc’s power broker beset by nationalists to her right, to become the biggest single party in the 751-seat chamber.
RIGHT-WING PARTIES ARE ON THE RISE
Right-wing ruling parties in Poland and Hungary, defying Brussels over curbs to judicial and media independence, will also return eurosceptic lawmakers on Sunday.
The anti-EU Brexit Party could also finish in first place in Britain — though the circumstances surrounding the election there are verging on the absurd. Britons will kick off the voting on Thursday two months after they were supposed to have left the EU. They will be choosing 73 MEPs who cannot be sure of even taking their seats in July.
The results should be clear by late on Sunday, ushering in weeks of bargaining among parties to form a stable majority in the Parliament, and among national leaders to choose successors to Juncker and other top EU officials.
Many expect a clash as early as Tuesday, when leaders meeting in Brussels are likely to snub Parliament’s demands that one of the newly elected lawmakers should run the EU executiv