Read: Macron and Salvini: Two leaders, two competing visions for Europe

Liberals, Greens, and far-right-nationalist parties were dubbed the primary winners of the night. These victories came at the expense of traditional center-left and center-right parties, which are expected to lose their combined majorities in the European Parliament. This means that should the center-right European People’s Party alliance and the center-left Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats wish to continue governing in coalition as they do now, they will need to seek the support of additional partners. “It’s clear this evening is a historical moment,” Guy Verhofstadt, the leader of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe, said Sunday, proclaiming that there is “a new balance of power” in the chamber.

The results weren’t a surprise for traditional centrist parties that have struggled at the national level. Germany’s ruling Conservatives and Social Democrats, who govern in coalition, suffered losses that mirrored the results of the country’s last general election. In the United Kingdom, the Conservative and Labour parties each hemorrhaged seats to smaller, pro-Brexit and pro-EU parties across the political spectrum.

European elections are typically treated as second-tier contests, in which few turn out to vote. Those who do tend to be driven by domestic issues and often opt to support smaller parties at the expense of established ones. This year, though, was different. Not only did an estimated 51 percent of the bloc’s 400 million eligible voters cast a ballot (a 20-year high, according to the European Parliament), but they did so in a campaign virtually dominated not by domestic issues, but by the EU and its future. Perhaps nowhere was this more evident than in Germany, where nearly all of the major parties (excluding the far-right Alternative for Germany) focused their campaign on their own vision for the bloc.

“These elections are really about sending a signal—do you want to develop the European Union further, or do you want to fall back to nationalism?” Svenja Hahn, a German MEP-elect for the pro-business Free Democratic Party, which increased its vote share by two seats, told me on her final day of campaigning, at a street fair in the northern-Germany city of Hamburg. She and her fellow Free Democratic Party members waved EU flags and held a large banner urging German voters to “Sag JA zu Europa,” or “Say YES to Europe.”

Even in Britain, which wasn’t expected to take part in these EU elections, the topic of Europe—and specifically Brexit—dominated the campaign. Though the nascent Brexit Party, which advocates for Britain leaving the EU without a withdrawal deal, performed the best, with 31.7 percent of the vote, pro-EU parties such as the Liberal Democrats and the Greens also made substantial gains. The outcome reflects deep divisions that already existed within Britain over Brexit: The five unequivocally pro-EU parties (including the Liberal Democrats, the Greens, the Scottish National Party, Change U.K., and Plaid Cymru) earned a collective 40 percent of the vote, compared with the combined 35 percent earned by the unequivocally euroskeptic Brexit Party and U.K. Independence Party.