Adam Boulton: European Parliament elections - why battle between EU's big guns matters for the UK

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

61% : Radical right parties are already in power or supporting governments in eight EU countries and are expected to come back in Austria's election due this month.
56% : EU policy is directed by the Council of Ministers, who are the elected leaders from individual member states.
56% : They differ on the economy - free markets and state intervention - and, above all, on Russia.
54% : The split in the mainstream right in the EU is in part a legacy of Britain's membership of the EU.
50% : Thanks to proportional representation however, he served continuously as an MEP for South East England from June 1999 to January 2020, when the UK left the EU as a result of the Brexit referendum.
47% : Five years later in 2019, when the UK had still not completed its exit from the EU, Farage led what was then called the Brexit Party to first place in the EP election.
45% : In 2014, UKIP beat Labour and the Conservatives, panicking David Cameron, the then-Conservative leader, into holding the EU referendum.
45% : This seems unlikely but it has not stopped von der Leyen touring the EU seeking support and making it clear that Europe will give less priority to green policies in the next parliament than it did in the current one.
45% : Whether the UK is in or out, neither the UK nor the EU are sheltered from the winds of radical right-wing populism.
43% : For example, during Britain's membership of the EU, Nigel Farage failed seven times to win first-past-the-post elections to become an MP at Westminster.
40% : The UK is no longer part of the EU.
37% : Americans will decide whether Donald Trump returns to the White House in November.
37% : But it is not clear that the warring factions on the right will unite to act together or work with the mainstream EPP, made up of conventional conservative and Christian Democratic parties.
34% : They have in common ethnic nationalism, anti-wokeism, Islamophobia, hostility to migrants and net zero, and suspicion of climate change and multilateral institutions including the EU, UN and NATO.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.