BRUSSELS – The European Parliament is preparing for a media-frenzy Sunday evening when the results of what it calls the biggest and most-complicated European elections ever will be collected and presented at its venue in Brussels.
Some 70 television channels, a similar number of radio stations and hundreds of journalists will be at the parliament in Brussels on Sunday evening to report on the elections.
Video: How European are the European Elections? (zEUs Project Video)
The parliament has made available 11 multi-camera studios, wired up with eight kilometers of fiberoptic cable and four kilometers of audio cable.
The studios are only available to tv channels that are a member of the Eurovision network and to the parliament’s own webtv channel; the parliament has denied use of one of these studios to EUX.TV.
Not only the number of candidates but also the number of different political parties complicates the vote. In France alone, 160 different parties are taking part. In Italy 82 and 17 in Estonia.
These elections “are bigger and more complicated” than in 2004, said Jaume Duch, spokesman for the European Parliament at a briefing.
In the European parliament, the parties combine cross-border alliances and create political groups. These political groups subsequently determine the way that the parliaments influences EU legislation.
The final results of the votes in all of the union’s 27 EU member states won’t be ready officially before Monday afternoon, when the Polish results are due. But from 21.00 hours local time Sunday evening, the parliament will start posting data on a special website that is not accessible yet. The first reliable projection of the outcome is expected shortly before 23.00 hours.
The first moment to watch will be at 21.00 hours, when the parliament will announce the first initial estimate for the turnout. Several individual member states whose polls close before that time, such as Austria by then may already have released their results.
At 22.00 hours, the last polling stations close, in Portugal, and that’s then the moment that the parliament will post a first initial projection of the outcome.
The projection will then be finetuned, so that by 23.00 hours, a formal projection can be presented.
From then on, at the parliament there will be reactions from the different political groups.
With less than one week to go before the elections, the fate of a number of political parties vying for seats in the European parliament remains unclear. Among them, the Italian democratic party Modem, which is still considering joining either the PSE socialists group or the liberal-democrat ALDE group.
“We’ll have at least one surprise up our sleeve,” said a spokesman for one of the groups.
One thing is clear though: the British Conservatives no longer will be part of the EPP group, which includes mostly christian-democratic parties.
