LIBERTAS IS on course for a devastating defeat in the European elections with just a handful of its European candidates in with a chance of being elected MEPs.
Up until a month ago, the anti- Lisbon party founded by businessman Declan Ganley was claiming it could elect up to 100 MEPs and radically reshape European politics. However exit polls published last night suggest the party will pick up only one seat in the 14 EU states where it is fielding 531 candidates.
In the Netherlands, unofficial results show none of Libertas’s 24 candidates has been elected. The party’s vote was so low it failed to register in exit polls.
In Latvia, a country where Libertas had high hopes after recruiting former prime minister Guntars Krasts to lead the party, exit polls show it just failed to get a seat. Unofficial results from Slovakia suggest Libertas’s partners – the Conservative Democrats of Slovakia (KDS) and Civic Conservative Party (OKS) – won just 2 per cent of the vote and no seats.
Libertas’s German partners, AUF (Party for Work, Environment and Family), failed to make the 3 per cent threshold. In Spain the 50 or so Libertas candidates also looked unlikely to win.
Opinion polls also suggest Libertas will struggle to pick up seats in Poland, the Czech Republic and Britain. Its best chance is in France, where it has teamed up with Movement for France, led by Viscount Philippe de Villiers.
However, polls suggest it will pick up just one seat, fewer than the three seats won by the movement in 2004.
“It is very hard to launch a new pan-European party or movement such as Libertas because European elections are seen as a mid-term test of national governments,” said Simon Hix, professor at the London School of Economics.
Libertas poured huge resources – estimated at about €30 million – into its pan-European campaign, which it led on a platform of opposition to the Lisbon Treaty. The public showed little interest though, with opinion polls showing that the economic crisis, unemployment and growth were the key issues.
“I think he over-extended himself by launching in so many states at once,” said analyst Hugo Brady. “There is no doubt he used very slick marketing techniques and branding in his campaign but he had no base of support in many of these countries. He also confused voters in Britain by opposing the Lisbon Treaty yet proclaiming that he was a pro-European.”