British and Dutch kick off European elections

LONDON: Voters in Britain and the Netherlands went to the polls on Thursday in marathon European parliamentary elections that are expected to deliver a swing toward populist right-wing parties across the continent.
The elections, which are spread over four days in the EU’s 28 member states, are set to produce major gains for anti-immigration parties bent on dismantling the European Union from the inside.
The vote, for which some 400 million Europeans are eligible, comes as the EU struggles for relevance in the aftermath of the eurozone crisis and grapples with the chaos on its borders in Ukraine.
“The immigration floodgate needs shutting — how can you bring more people over if there’s not enough jobs for your own people?” James Donaghy, 66, told AFP as he voted for the UK Independence Party (UKIP) in Sevenoaks, southeast England.
Polls opened at 0530 GMT in the Netherlands and 0600 GMT in Britain. Most of the other EU states vote on Sunday, with the exception of Ireland and the Czech Republic on Friday, and Latvia, Malta and Slovakia on Saturday.
When the results are announced from 2100 GMT on Sunday, euroskeptic parties may top the polls in Britain, France, Italy and the Netherlands. The anti-immigration and anti-EU UKIP, and Party of Freedom (PVV) in the Netherlands, are both forecast to make big gains.






UKIP’s rise has rocked the British political establishment as a party without a single seat in its Parliament heads into the European election ahead of the main opposition Labour Party, according to polls in the Times and the Daily Mail newspapers Thursday.
The party’s rise was seen as a factor in Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron’s pledge to hold a referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU in late 2017.
Farage has ruled out joining a far-right bloc of Wilders’ party and France’s National Front, led by Marine Le Pen, saying the National Front is anti-Semitic.
As he cast his vote in a village school, Farage rejected claims of racism against his own party and said he wanted to cause a political “earthquake.”
“If we get what we like, things will never be quite the same again,” he told reporters.
Farage also predicted the highest turnout in European elections since the first in 1979, despite the fact that the figure dropped from 62 percent at that vote to just 43 percent in the last election in 2009.
Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy reignited the debate on the other side of the English Channel, saying that reform of the EU was necessary to halt the rise of populist parties.
In an opinion piece published Thursday, Sarkozy called for the end of Europe’s visa-free Schengen area and the creation of a Franco-German economic bloc at the heart of the eurozone.