France’s extreme-right National Front looks set to gain a majority of France’s 74 seats in the European Parliament, with an exit poll handing it 25 percent of the vote in Sunday’s EU elections.
Pollsters gave the center-right UMP opposition between 20 and 21 percent and President Francois Hollande's ruling Socialists about 14.5 percent, down from the 16 percent they received in 2009.
If the National Front's victory is confirmed, it will be the first time that the anti-immigrant, anti-EU party has won a nationwide election in its four-decade history.
Marine Le Pen, President of the National Front, immediately called for the dissolution of the French national assembly after the exit polls showed her anti-immigrant party winning .
"What else can the president do after such a rejection?" Le Pen told reporters at Front National headquarters when asked if Hollande should dissolve the national parliament. "It is unacceptable that the assembly should be so unrepresentative of the French people."
The voting across four days in 28 countries, according to exit polls late on Sunday, delivered a string of sensational outcomes, with radical and nationalist anti-EU forces scoring major victories both on the far right and the hard left.
The nationalist anti-immigrant Danish People's party won by a similar margin in Denmark. In Austria, the far right Freedom Party took one fifth of the vote, according to projections, while on the extreme left, Alexis Tsipras led Greece's Syriza movement to a watershed victory over the country's two governing and traditional ruling parties, New Democracy conservatives and the Pasok social democrats.
But in the Netherlands, the anti-Islam Freedom Party of Geert Wilders' - which plans to forge an alliance with France's National Front - fell well short of its goal of topping the poll.
Projections by German television indicated that Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats would secure 36 percent of the vote, down from a 23-year-high of 41.5 percent in last year's federal election but still a clear victory. The SPD (Social Democrats) made significant gains, narrowing the gap between the two big parties to around 8 percentage points.
The anti-euro Alternative for Germany (AfD) party won parliamentary representation for the first time, with an estimated 6.5 percent, the best result so far for a conservative party created only last year.
It was a different story in Greece, epicentre of the euro zone's debt crisis, where the extreme-left, anti-austerity Syriza movement of Alexis Tsipras was expected to take 26-30 percent of the vote, pushing the governing New Democracy into second place.
The extreme right anti-Semitic Golden Dawn party was expected to win 9 to 10 percent of the vote.
In Britain, Nigel Farage’s UK Independence Party, which campaigns to leave the European Union, was tipped to unsettle the polticial mainstream by coming first or second in the election.
And Merkel's Christian Democrats dropped several points while the SPD (social democrats) made significant gains, narrowing the gap between the two big parties to around 8 percentage points.
The election mattered more than ever before because the European Parliament has gained greater powers since the Lisbon Treaty, meaning it will have a strong say in most EU legislation over the next five years and will also shape the outcome of the battle for the most powerful post in Brussels, the new President of the European commission.
But despite the number of Eurosceptic MEPs may double, officials results from around the 28 EU countries due late on Sunday evening, pro-European centre-left (Social Democrats) and centre-right(Christian Democrats) parties seemed sure to maintain control of the 751-seat EU parliament. The Liberals would stay the third political group.
Turnout in the 28 countries was at around 45%.