The Monkey Cage

Gideon Rachman suggests that anti-Eu folks and extremists are going to do very well in next month’s elections to the European Parliament.

It is entirely possible that the far-right British National Party … will gain a seat, perhaps more than one in the European Parliamentary elections on June 4th. The BNP are not showing up well in the polls - but that is probably because people are reluctant to admit voting for them. … UKIP - the UK Independence Party, which wants to withdraw the UK from the European Union - is another party that should benefit from the scandal. … ? Geert Wilders, a Dutch politician who capitalises on anti-Muslim sentiment (slogan -”Against Eurabia and for the Netherlands”) is doing well in the polls. One conservative blog claims that he is even ahead of the main centre-right party, the Christian Democrats - which would be a sensation, if true. And a lot of people are also expecting big things from the Trotskyites in France

Simon Hix (LSE), Michael Marsh (TCD), and Nick Vivyan (LSE), who have put together Predict09.EU, a website that uses polling data to predict likely outcomes, beg to differ. They suggest that the number of extreme right and anti-Europe deputies (they don’t talk about the Trots) will be the same in the new Parliament as the old one, while the center left will make moderate gains against the center right. This sounds plausible to me - but so too does Gideon’s suggestion that some of the gains of the extreme right are likely not showing up in the polls. As best I know, this is the first second (see Pedro in comments) major effort of this sort for the European Parliament, so its results will be interesting whether they are accurate or inaccurate.