In the final leg of the European Parliament election campaign, pro-EU forces have moved aggressively to capitalize on late stumbles by nationalists who made much of the early running and are still projected to make big gains.

The precise outcome of the race — 28 national contests, really — remains up for grabs, particularly the balance of power among the mainstream parties, with the center right and center left in a much closer than expected contest for the top spot, although both are expected to lose seats overall.

More than 426 million people are eligible to cast ballots during the four-day vote that begins Thursday to fill the Parliament’s 751 seats. Parties across Europe are fighting to the last minute to secure the extra support that could mean a top EU post for one of their leaders and more influence for their camp in shaping the Continent over the next five years.

It is the biggest election in the Western world, and a disparate array of far-right, nationalist and populist parties are projected to make substantial progress — possibly capturing one-third of the Parliament, and loosening the grip that the center left and center right have held on Brussels since the EU’s founding.

This is not quite Europe’s version of Donald Trump sweeping into the White House. Pro-EU forces are virtually certain to form a broader coalition and keep the top jobs.

For centrists on the Continent, there has been no better ammunition than the scandal that has unfolded in Austria.

But there are more than a few echoes of the American disrupter-in-chief’s retrenchment from the post-war multilateral order in the protectionist, anti-immigrant campaign rhetoric of Matteo Salvini, the leader of Italy’s League, Marine Le Pen, the founder of National Rally in France, and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, the proselytizer of Christian Europe and illiberal democracy who got Trump's seal of approval in Washington earlier this month.

Euroskeptic parties are positioned to finish first, or a close second, in some of the bloc’s biggest nations — including the founding powers of France and Italy in the West, the ex-Communist stronghold of Poland in the East, and in the United Kingdom, which was meant to have left the EU by now.

And yet, uncharacteristically, the soft-power establishment known for settling its disputes over coffee, chocolate or perhaps a glass of wine if things get really tough, is actually fighting back, seizing on missteps by far-right figures in Austria, France, Germany, Italy and Sweden to hit hard at the populists.

In Britain, pro-EU activists have literally turned the election into a food fight by pelting Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage and his allies with milkshakes. Farage’s opponents have also seized on revelations that he took gifts worth hundreds of thousands of pounds from a benefactor to fund a lavish lifestyle.

For centrists on the Continent, there has been no better ammunition than the scandal that has unfolded in Austria, after the leader of the far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ), Heinz-Christian Strache, was caught on video offering to trade public contracts for campaign support from a woman posing as the niece of a Russian oligarch.

As it happened, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker was addressing a trade union congress in Vienna on Tuesday — and he used the occasion to issue a rallying cry to mainstream parties.

“This congress being held here in Vienna is in precisely the right place at precisely the right time,” he said. “By working together we can show that we are prepared to fight for what is worth maintaining,” Juncker added. “And it’s worth us showing that for the next decade for Europe ... Social Democrats, Christian Democrats and others are able to stand up and fight against this danger from the extreme right.”

National contests

Overall, the FPÖ scandal will have limited impact beyond Austria’s borders given that the European Parliament is elected in 28 different national contests.

Those 28 races are largely being defined by national issues.

In the U.K., of course, the election is dominated by the Brexit debacle. It has been nearly three years since the referendum in which a narrow majority of British voters chose to quit the EU, but Prime Minister Theresa May and her government have failed to make Brexit a reality. EU27 leaders have twice postponed the deadline for the U.K.’s departure, now set for October 31, with the last delay leaving no choice but for Britain to participate in the European election. Farage’s Brexit Party is leading in a volatile contest — milkshake attacks included — with May’s Conservatives languishing in fourth place in the polls.

In France, the election is in many ways is a rematch between the nationalist Le Pen, who was recently photographed in Estonia making a white supremacist hand gesture, and centrist President Emmanuel Macron, who trounced her in the national election in 2017. Macron, however, has suffered a drop in popularity amid a wave of anti-government protests. And Le Pen has renamed her party National Rally (it used to be National Front) in a bid to make a new start. Polls show the two parties neck and neck to claim the most seats, with the conservative Les Républicains far behind and the Socialists facing a wipeout.

In Italy, Salvini, the interior minister, has tried to build his League party’s campaign around his anti-immigrant and nationalist policies. But he has found himself under pressure not just from other EU countries like Germany and from the Catholic Church for his hard line on migration but also from the League’s own partner in government, the anti-establishment 5Star Movement.

The League is still on course to finish first but it has been hit by corruption scandals, and Salvini no longer seems the master of all he surveys.

On Sunday evening, Salvini was on a television talk show repeating his mantra that Italian ports have been sealed shut to rescue boats picking up migrants in the Mediterranean Sea, when suddenly the presenter announced that a rescue ship, the Sea Watch, had just been allowed to dock in the port of Lampedusa, south of Sicily, where it disembarked 47 migrants. Salvini was furious. “I’m the minister,” he stammered. (The 5Stars denied any involvement in the move.)

In the race for Commission president, ALDE has refused to put forward a single Spitzenkandidat in an effort to protest the system.

In Spain, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez is hoping that the vote for the European Parliament mirrors a national election last month, in which he led his Socialists to a big victory. Among the top issues in Spain is the continuing demand for independence by some Catalan separatists. The fugitive Catalan leader, Carles Puigdemont, is even running in the race, though he must campaign from Brussels where he has been living to avoid being arrested if he returns home.

In Germany, the CDU/CSU governing alliance of Chancellor Angela Merkel looks certain to finish first, albeit with a lower score than in the last European election five years ago. But the center-left Social Democrats, Merkel’s coalition partners, face a battering that could put her government at risk. The surging Greens may overtake the SPD to finish second, and the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party is forecast to make gains.

And so it goes, from one country to the next, with each focused on its own issues even as the collective outcome will help shape the leadership in Brussels and chart the course of the EU for at least the next five years.

Looking for a president

The European Council, made up of the 28 heads of state and government, will meet for dinner in Brussels next Tuesday night to discuss the election results and formally begin their deliberations to nominate a new Commission president, who must then be confirmed by a majority of Parliament. The leaders have said they will not be bound by the Spitzenkandidat process, which envisions them choosing one of the “lead candidates” of the pan-European party groups that ran in the election.

That could spell trouble for Manfred Weber, the German MEP and lead candidate of the center-right European People’s Party, which is projected to win the most seats. Commission First Vice President Frans Timmermans, the nominee of the Party of European Socialists, is hoping his center-left party pulls off a surprising upset — a possibility that becomes more likely if Hungarian PM Orbán’s Fidesz party, which has been suspended by the EPP, makes a full break from the mainstream conservatives.

Meanwhile, Macron and leaders from the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE), including Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, are working to form a new centrist group, while simultaneously courting the two most prominent Socialist leaders in the EU — Sánchez and Portuguese Prime Minister António Costa — with an eye toward creating a left-leaning power base within the European Council.

In the race for Commission president, ALDE has refused to put forward a single Spitzenkandidat in an effort to protest the system, which it says favors the EPP, and instead has presented a slate of candidates.

In the end, though, the mainstream parties are expected to have to unite and form a coalition in order to blunt the influence of the Euroskeptics, who have been rocked by the Austrian scandal and other controversies, in recent days.

In Germany, the AfD was hit with a fine by the national parliament last month over illegal campaign donations from a Swiss-based company.

In Sweden, the far-right Sweden Democrats kicked out one of its own candidates, Kristina Winberg, an incumbent member of the European Parliament, who had raised allegations that another Sweden Democrat MEP, Peter Lundgren, had sexually harassed a female colleague. Lundgren denied the accusation. He admitted there was a drunken incident in which he had touched the colleague’s breast but said she had forgiven him. Winberg was accused of trying to damage the party.

And in France, National Rally fired an assistant of MEP Nicolas Bay, after a photo was posted on Twitter showing the assistant imitating a Hasidic Jew by wearing a black hat and fake side-curls. Weeks later, Le Pen, the party leader was photographed in Estonia with Ruuben Kaalep, a member of the Conservative People’s Party (EKRE) of Estonia with both flashing the “OK” symbol that has become a white supremacist gesture. Le Pen later denied knowing the meaning of the hand signal.

“We move on in our project to collaborate with all those who ask for a radical change. And the FPÖ is a cornerstone of this project" — Marco Zanni, League MEP

While the various scandals seem mostly contained, the Austrian revelations, which led Chancellor Sebastian Kurz to dismantle his government coalition, have knocked several far-right leaders off balance and further dented the chances that they will be able to form a broad Euroskeptic coalition in the Parliament. Strache, the former vice chancellor, had made high-profile public appearances with other populist leaders in recent weeks, including Salvini and Orbán.

The FPÖ’s troubles were a blow to Salvini’s efforts to build a broad populist alliance, with a focus on parties in government to maximize its influence. “Salvini lost a governing party,” a Euroskeptic official who works in the European Parliament told POLITICO. “No one wants to work with them again.”

The FPÖ’s downfall means there are now just four such parties in government: Orbán’s Fidesz in Hungary, Law and Justice in Poland, Salvini’s League in Italy and EKRE in Estonia.

Forced onto the defensive, the Euroskeptics have been in full damage-control mode.

“Strache resigned from all his positions, even in the party,” stressed Marco Zanni, a high-profile MEP from the League. “We move on in our project to collaborate with all those who ask for a radical change. And the FPÖ is a cornerstone of this project.”