European elections: Italy begins vote for next EU parliament

Police in the southwestern German city of Karlsruhe said three individuals from the far-right political party Alternative for Germany (AfD) were assaulted after a campaign event in the city as they sat in a cafe on Saturday afternoon.

Two of the three individuals — all of whom sustained light injuries — are local council members.

Police say they were able to detain five individuals who were later released after their personal details were registered, several others are said to have fled the scene. 

The injured AfD members claimed that roughly 10 masked perpetrators attacked them with baseball bats, saying, "It was only thanks to the courageous intervention of security personnel sitting at the next table that worse could be prevented."

Police could not confirm or deny the use of bats, adding only that a stick had been found at the scene.

A criminal investigation into the incident has been opened.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz reaffirmed his administration's support for Ukraine Saturday before voters cast ballots in Sunday's European Parliamentary elections.

Scholz's words were delivered in a weekly video address and on stage at a rally for his Social Democratic Party's (SPD) EU candidate, Katarina Barley, staged in the industrial city of Duisburg.

Scholz echoed words recently delivered to the Bundestag, emphasizing: "Russia will not get away with its imperialist plans. Putin must realize that he cannot win his brutal campaign. That there can only be a just peace for Ukraine."

Scholz again made clear he has no intention of sending German troops to Ukraine, insisting, "We will continue to prevent escalation" and adding, the German stance can be summarized as, "prudence, prudence, prudence."

The speech was interrupted by flares and other pyrotechnics as well as jeers from pro-Palestinian and anti-government protesters.   

Police in riot gear briefly detained and checked the IDs of a total of 84 individuals with authorities saying they will press charges for an "unauthorized assembly" and the detonation of pyrotechnics.

Protesters waved Palestinian flags and displayed several placards. Police are looking into whether any of these contained illegal slogans.

Current polling shows the SPD taking about 15% of the vote Sunday, about the same as the far-right AfD.    

Peter Magyar, a 43-year-old former government insider, spoke to a cheering crowd of tens of thousands of supporters in Budapest on Saturday, on the eve of EU and Hungarian municipal elections in which he has emerged as nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orban's most serious political challenger.

Though Orban and his Fidesz party — in power since 2010 — look likely to take between 44-49% of the vote, Magyar's Tisza movement is tipped to take between 23-29%.

A former Foreign Ministry employee in the prime minister's Brussels office, Magyar left Fidesz over the corruption and state propaganda he says he witnessed from inside Orban's political machine.

Magyar shot onto the scene in the wake of a child-abuse scandal that rocked the Orban government and led to the resignation of Orban allies, President Katalin Novak and Magyar's ex-wife, former Justice Minister Judith Varga.

Speaking to supporters Saturday, Magyar attacked the Orban "system" of illiberal democracy and self-preservation.

As flags reading "Wake Up Hungary" and "We Are the Masters of Our Future" waved in the crowd, Magyar bellowed: "Together we can save Hungary… We are here and we are ready to change our destiny… the fate that thieving, oppressive power wants to impose on us. Viktor Orban has been keeping his own people in fear."

Orban, an international right-wing darling, has sought to frame Sunday's EU vote as a referendum on Ukraine and has promised to "occupy Brussels" in the event of a right-wing sweep at the polls.

Portugal's far-right Chega has been accused of manipulating a video showing a migrant worker confronting party leader Andre Ventura.

A Bangladeshi national approached Ventura at an event on Thursday to denounce the poor conditions that many migrants experience. He told the Chega leader that he had sent his daughter back to Bangladesh due to racism.

Ventura, who leads Portugal's third-largest political party, accused the worker on social media of fabricating his story and shared a video of the exchange.

Local media alleged that the video was manipulated, with images taken out of context and subtitles altered to make it sound like the migrant had lied.

Around 800,000 migrants live in Portugal, nearly twice as high as a decade ago. The country also saw a 38% rise in hate crimes last year.

While far-right and conservative parties are expected to make gains across Europe this weekend, the latest poll shows Chega getting 12% of the vote, a huge drop from the 18.1% it received in the Portuguese general election in March.

Thousands of people took to the streets of the German capital on Saturday to demonstrate against the rising support for far-right parties and politics, a day before the country votes in the European elections.

Protesters carried banners with the words "Love instead of hate," "Rights for people instead of right-wing people" and "Diversity without alternative."

Police in Berlin said organizers had registered for up to 10,000 participants.

A police spokesperson said the demonstration was peaceful initially despite a "strong influx" of people.

Several other German cities, including Hamburg, Munich, Cologne and Dresden, held similar rallies organized by an alliance of civil society organizations under the motto "Stop right-wing extremism. Defend democracy."

Amid rising immigration and a stuttering economy, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has seen a surge in support over the past 18 months.

The party could see its vote share reach 14% on Sunday, versus 11% during the 2019 elections.

The AfD had 22% support at the start of the year but has since been rocked by several scandals, including revelations of a secret plan for the forced deportation of millions of foreigners in Germany. The AfD's original lead candidate, who has been replaced, is under investigation for suspicious links to Russia and China. 

Several other EU states, however, are seeing a strong showing for far-right parties and politicians, causing consternation in several European capitals and Brussels.

After a spate of attacks on politicians across Germany in the lead-up to the European Parliament elections, three more incidents were reported to the police.

A 70-year-old politician from the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) was attacked at a campaign stand in the eastern German city of Dresden on Saturday morning, police said.

The party said Hans-Jürgen Zickler, an AfD member in Saxony's state parliament, was punched in the face.

A 47-year-old man has been taken into custody in connection with the attack.

Two further attacks on politicians took place on Friday. During the first, a firecracker was thrown into a crowd at a campaign event by the center-left Social Democrats(SPD) in the town of Bargteheide, Schleswig-Holstein — Germany's northernmost state.

The firework narrowly missed SPD federal lawmaker Bengt Bergt, who was in attendance alongside European Parliament candidate Fabian Vehlies. No one was injured.

In another incident in Eisenberg, Thuringia, in central Germany, Steffen Much, a candidate for the socialist Left party, was attacked and insulted in a supermarket, according to a party source.

Much was unharmed and filed a police complaint against the alleged attacker, who is familiar to him.

Polling stations opened in Italy on Saturday for the European Parliamentary elections, three days into the four-day vote.

Voting began at 3:00 p.m. local time (1300 UTC/GMT) with more than 47 million people in the European Union's third-largest economy eligible to participate. 

Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni's far-right Brothers of Italy party is tipped to win — polls suggest it could achieve 27% of the vote, more than four times its support in 2019.

Italy has 76 seats in the 720-seat European Parliament, so Meloni could play kingmaker over whether European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen gets the backing she needs, from both member states and parliament, for a second term.

One day before Germans go to the polls in the European Parliament elections, Chancellor Olaf Scholz said that Germany does not believe in closing its markets to foreign competition.

"We do not close our markets to foreign companies, as we don't want that in reverse for our companies after all," Scholz said at an event marking the 125th anniversary of carmaker Opel's Rüsselsheim plant.

Expressing confidence in the German automotive sector, Scholz said he had no doubt Germany would continue to lead in this century as well, "if we rely on progress and renewal." This would require free and fair global trade, he said.

In late 2023, the EU Commission launched a competition investigation against China over alleged illegal subsidies for electric cars. If Beijing is found to be violating international trade law, Brussels could impose punitive tariffs on Chinese vehicles. Scholz has repeatedly spoken out against this.

The chancellor also defended the climate-friendly restructuring of the automotive industry. "We stand by the expansion of electromobility," he said.

Anyone who wants to turn this back now "is not only jeopardizing everything we have already achieved, they are also jeopardizing our future success, our future prosperity as an industrial nation," Scholz stressed.

No new cars with internal combustion engines are to be registered in the European Union after 2035. However, right-wing parties in particular oppose ending the use of the internal combustion engine.

Polling stations across Latvia are open from 8 a.m. (0500 GMT) until 20:00, with dozens of polling stations also open to Latvian citizens abroad, mainly at embassies and consulates.

By the time polls opened on Saturday, public broadcaster LSM said 8.37% of those eligible to vote had already done so in advance.

That figure was below the 11% recorded five years ago at the same stage, suggesting turnout could well be on the low side, despite attempts by officials and political parties to mobilize voters.

Voters will elect nine Latvian Members of the European Parliament in 2024.

Last time, two seats went to the liberal-conservative Unity party and the center-left Harmony party gained two. The right-wing National Alliance snapped up three but lost one who defected to Unity. There was also one seat for the centrist Movement For! and one for the Latvian Russian Union.

Voters in Malta are at the polls to elect six members of the European Parliament, as well as local councilors.

Polling stations opened at 7 a.m. (0500 GMT) and close at 10 p.m., with 332,967 eligible voters. Voting is taking place in primary schools across the islands of Malta and Gozo. 

Some 37,000 voters, or 10% of the electorate, chose not to pick up their voting document by midnight on Thursday, local media reported.

The Malta Today news website said the figure had been expected to be higher, which might indicate a higher-than-expected turnout.

It's Malta's fifth European election since it joined the EU in 2004. At the last election in 2019, the Labour Party won four European Parliament seats and the Nationalist Party two.

Voting for the European Parliament is by direct universal suffrage in a single ballot, with the number of members of parliament for each country dependent on the size of its population.

The number of seats ranges from six for Malta, Luxembourg, and Cyprus to 96 for Germany. 

Europeans elected 751 lawmakers in the last vote in 2019.

After the United Kingdom left the EU the following year, the number of members of the European Parliament (MEPs) fell to 705. Some of the 73 seats previously held by British lawmakers were redistributed to other member states.

The European Parliament will have 15 additional members after the latest election, bringing the total to 720, with 12 countries getting extra MEPs.

Within the European Parliament, the parties tend to gravitate toward large international groups that are broadly aligned in terms of their policy aims.

Slovakia's polling stations have opened as the country becomes the latest to start voting in the Europe-wide elections, under the shadow of the shooting of Prime Minister Robert Fico last month.

The May 15 assassination attempt on Fico by a 71-year-old poet shocked Slovakia's 5.4 million population and spread shockwaves across the EU.

Fico, looking thinner, issued a pre-poll video in which he described his attacker as "an activist of the Slovak opposition." He accused the opposition of "aggressive and hateful politics."

"It was only a matter of time before a tragedy would occur," Fico said in the 14-minute video. 
Fico's party opposes EU arms deliveries to Ukraine and rails against alleged "warmongers" in Brussels.

The attack on him echoes violence that has occurred elsewhere in the bloc. 

A man hit Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen in a Copenhagen square late Friday, the latest in a string of incidents in which politicians appear to have been targeted.  

Italy's far-right Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni could be decisive in choosing the next European Commission president if her Brothers of Italy (FdI) party makes major gains in the European Parliament elections. 

Incumbent Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has been seeking Meloni's support in the hope of winning the confirmatory votes of the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group. 

The pan-European soft-eurosceptic bloc is led by Meloni and her FdI candidates would join if elected to the European Parliament.

As the EU's third-most populous country, Italy can send a total of 76 delegates to the 720-seat European Parliament. 

The Italian leader has been playing her cards close to her chest, although she has said her goal is to send all of the EU's left-wing parties into opposition.

Political analysts have predicted that center-left and green parties will lose seats to both the far and center-right in this round of European Parliament elections.

The European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) predicted early this year a "sharp right turn" with anti-EU parties winning in nine EU countries — including Belgium, Italy, and France. 

Such an outcome would threaten the majority held by parties from the three traditional mainstream groupings: the center-right European People's Party (EPP); the center-left Socialists and Democrats (S&D): and the liberal-centrist Renew Europe. 

The far-right nationalist Identity and Democracy (ID) and its less radical but eurosceptic European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) both have big hopes. 

It's thought that ID — which recently expelled Germany's far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) — could win 67 seats, with the ECR picking up 74. 

That would bring the total to 141 seats — a leap of more than 23 seats compared to the current total in the 720-seat parliament. 

Meanwhile, the more centrist parties of EPP, S&D, and Renew are projected to win 407 seats together, representing a slimmer majority but still potentially enough to preserve the working majority in place since 2019.

rc/rmt (AFP, AP, dpa, Reuters)