BBC NEWS | European Election 2009 | EU Country Results

The results are in for the European Parliament elections 2009, and we now know broadly not only the representatives sent by the UK to the European Parliament, but also the general positions of umbrella party groups in the Parliament itself.

This thread just aims to collect everyone's overview of the elections, what think these results may mean, if anything, and how they felt the party they were supporting did given prior expectations.

Personally, I think the party most disappointed by the results should be the Conservative Party. I know this may sound strange given that they basically earned a share of the vote comparable to Labour and the Liberal Democrats combined, but their increase in terms of share of the vote from 2004 was only 1% approximately.

To me, given that turnout was low and we can assume that a good number of Labour voters stayed away at this election, it proves that Cameron's party is not winning over that many new followers. Of course parties such as UKIP will have taken votes from the Conservatives in the European Elections at a rate that will not happen in a General Election, but given the shift of the Tories to a more eurosceptic stance by sounding out new parties suggesting a breakaway from the EPP, the Tories haven't really been able to claw away at UKIP support base.

Labour's collapse seems to have triggered an increase in votes for smaller parties, rather than instigating a shift to the Conservatives, and in both the North East and Wales, the Green Party did not come far behind the threshold for winning a seat.

The Welsh result was obviously a major talking point of the night, and will worry both Labour, and to a perhaps a greater extent Plaid Cymru, who are the normal beneficiaries in Wales if Labour is going through a bad patch. UKIP certainly campaigned hard in my area and if that was representative across Wales then their gaining of a seat was earned through a tremendous effort.

There are loads more things that I could rabbit on about, but I'm even boring myself now. Anyway, thoughts anyone?