Italy votes in EU polls amid low turnout, far-right fears

The European elections, likely to see record low voter turnout and gains for far-right and left parties, kicked off yesterday in Italy posing a test for scandal-hit Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

As the polls to select a new European parliament for five years gathered pace -Cyprus, Latvia, Malta and Slovakia also voted - Britain's government reeled as ministers resigned, even before the EU results came in.

Exit polls in Ireland, which voted on Friday, suggested the government there had suffered a voter backlash in a triple ballot, including local polls, with the recession biting hard there, but also elsewhere across the continent.

Berlusconi, the only leader of a large EU member state to stand as head of an electoral list, showed no signs of the growing pressure to explain his ties to an 18-year-old aspiring model.

"The electoral results will represent a terrible defeat for this left, which has substituted an electoral programme - which it doesn't have - for calumny," Berlusconi said last Monday, referring to a smear campaign against him.

While economic woes could lead voters to punish their governments, concern is rife that voter apathy might undermine the victory that Berlusconi and analysts expect the conservatives to seal in the new 736-seat EU parliament.

Opinion polls suggest low turnout could favour fringe parties, although probably not enough to upset the balance in the assembly, which is slowly gaining power in EU decision-making.

The Netherlands has been a case in point.

Last Thursday, Dutch far-right and anti-Islamic lawmaker Geert Wilders' Party for Freedom came second in its first EU poll with 17 per cent of the vote, winning four seats in the assembly, according to near-complete results.

"This confirms the fears," said Antonio Missiroli, analyst at the European Policy Centre think-tank in Brussels. But "it's not completely unexpected. It's not a bad surprise, just bad news."

Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende's Christian Democrats lost over four percentage points to finish with less than 20 per cent of the vote.

Release of the Dutch results broke rules banning their publication before polls close at 10 p.m. on Europe's super Sunday when a remaining 19 EU nations head to the ballot booths.