I was a pessimist, therefore the results have actually come out pretty good to me. Far right didn't win Belgium, and Left party gained a lot of seats in Finland while right wing parties lost seats. Yeah Germany (eyes them suspiciously) and France turned out very right, but a lot of the other countries stayed about ideologically the same or gained left leaning seats.
Overall it seems it's balanced enough to keep going with the corporate accountability / public convenience stuff we've been seeing here in the EU, especially related to tech.
Austria could have gone worse, despite the FPÖ up. In Germany you have this kind of cordon sanitaire, the other parties have an agreement of sorts to never cooperate with the AfD, the CDU/CSU has been a bit flimsy on that though.
Meanwhile in Austria, the FPÖ has been around forever and used to represent some liberal politics way back when so they didn't have that cordon sanitaire, including coalition governments between the ÖVP (the equivalent of the CDU/CSU but imbroiled somehow in more political turmoil in recent years) and FPÖ on numerous occasions. And what happened in this election is that basically three seats went from the ÖVP straight to the FPÖ.
Basically Austrian representation in the EU probably got marginally worse for all it matters, but in turn the CDU/CSU saw that any cooperation with the AfD would just lead to voters of theirs just going to the AfD in the long run, strengthening the case for a cordon sanitaire.
At least I hope that's how they'll interpret it. The other Austrian shift was one from the Greens to the heavily pro-EU NEOS, as much as I'll disagree on some of their domestic policies when it comes to their EU politics they're a bit more palatable.
I am apologising for what Gražulis does in advance.
Tis the season...
