BY VOTING in their millions to reject the European Union, Britons have revealed what a European bunch they really are. The storming success of the UK Independence Party (UKIP)—which wants Britain to leave the EU but came first in yesterday's European Parliament election—has aligned the country with the likes of France, Denmark and Italy, where other such Eurosceptic parties did well. British voters have joined their continental neighbours in a collective howl of anguish at Brussels, globalisation and the 21st-century world in general.



Of the three established parties, the Liberal Democrats were the most obvious losers. They shed 10 of their 11 seats in the European Parliament. For a party of Europhiles who take European democracy more seriously than most, and coming after a dismal set of local election results on Thursday, it was a heavy blow. The two senior figures deployed to put the party’s case on television, Tim Farron and Danny Alexander, looked ashen-faced and almost lost for words as the litany of failure was put to them. Their leader, Nick Clegg, was not to be seen. He would probably face a leadership challenge in the coming weeks were there an obvious candidate to replace him. Fortunately for the deputy prime minister, there is not. The results of the opposition Labour Party were arguably even worse—relative to expectations, at least. It had long been assumed that the Lib Dems would perform terribly. The party had briefed that it might lose all of its MEPs, for example. But Labour really should have come first (several polling firms had predicted that it would), or at least close to UKIP’s score. Instead, it ended up three points and four European Parliament seats below the insurgents, and only a fraction above the governing Conservative Party. It had, to be fair, picked up seven seats to end up with 20, but even die-hard loyalists conceded that it had been a bad night. The results were barely in when accusations started to fly. An article in The Times told of poisonous briefings against Michael Dugher, one of the campaign managers. Further such murmurings are expected in the coming days.



The Conservatives got off relatively lightly. Governments rarely win European elections and David Cameron had spent the past months bracing his troops for a terrible showing and planning a post-election restart (a reshuffle, some new messages and maybe a policy announcement or two) for the coming week. Winning 19 seats (down seven from the 2009 election) was hardly a stellar performance, but better than had been expected. The Conservatives are now looking ahead to the Newark by-election on June 5th. Holding the seat would help the prime minister further cement the sense that things could be worse.



And UKIP? Its leader, Nigel Farage, described the victory as the most extraordinary political event in the past 100 years. This was audacious hyperbole, but the scale of the win is undeniably impressive. UKIP won 28% of the vote and became the first party, other than the Tories and Labour, to win a national British election in over a century. It picked up support across the country (improbably winning a seat in Scotland), but in particular in those places where it can give the sitting MP a run for his money in the general election campaign next year. That enables the party to confidently concentrate resources in such constituencies in the intervening months. In one, the Lincolnshire town of Boston, it won a vote share of 52%.



The result of the election has sparked energetic debates, particularly in Labour circles, about how to deal with UKIP. Some think the opposition needs to toughen up its policies on Europe and immigration to win back blue-collar support. Others retort that doing so would be a transparently craven attempt to curry favour with voters, who would see through it and feel yet more vindicated in voting UKIP. A third camp reckons that the worries are exaggerated, noting that European election results are rarely reflected in general elections, which use a different voting system, concern different issues and are taken much more seriously.

To truly know UKIP (and thus how to compete with it), the mainstream political parties need to look at its similarities with Eurosceptic and populist parties elsewhere in the EU. The parallels are striking, suggesting that its rise is about more than just a fumbled election campaign, peculiarly British policy debates or Britain’s island mentality. In different countries across the EU the same process was in motion on election night: the electoral coalitions that have traditionally propelled social democratic parties to power were fragmenting. Their voters were dispersing in various different directions. Some were turning to green parties like the Austrian Grünen, others to far left outfits like Syriza in Greece, and others were going to single-issue parties like the Feminist Initiative Party in Sweden. But a substantial segment of the old centre-left base—the older, white, post-industrial blue collar voters who feel economically and culturally marginalised—went to the Eurosceptic right: to parties (different though they may be in tone and emphasis) like the True Finns, the Front National and UKIP.

These socio-economic forces explain why such parties are almost universally hostile to globalisation and immigration, why they lean towards protectionism and why they engage in the sort of cultural politics that until recently was more common in America than in Europe. It also explains why they rarely thrive in large cities. In provincial towns, villages and suburbs around the continent, people whose jobs and livelihoods have been disrupted by immigration, outsourcing and automation no longer fit into the same social democratic “big tent” as urban professionals, ethnic minority voters, students and public-sector workers. The decline of the trade unions has further added to this sense of alienation from the centre-left establishment.

Britain shares all of these traits with other EU states. Consider, for example, the gulf between the declining former fishing and shipbuilding towns where UKIP did best (places like Grimsby, Great Yarmouth and Ramsgate) and booming, youthful, diverse London, where it was much weaker and where Labour obtained by far its most impressive results. The pattern was almost precisely mirrored in France and Denmark—in fact, in all three countries the main Eurosceptic party obtained 16 or 17% in the capital city but about ten points more nationally.

Much will be said over the coming months (on this blog, among other places) about what UKIP’s success means and what the mainstream parties can do about it. Examples from other countries where moderate parties face challenges from hardliners are likely to prove relevant to this. Already, one obvious case study suggests itself: that of Matteo Renzi, the Italian premier whose governing Democratic Party won a record 41% of votes and relegated the Eurosceptic “Five Star Movement", once tipped to win, to a distant second place.

As the BBC’s election night coverage drew to a close last night, Vernon Bogdanor, a respected political scientist, observed that the chance of Britain leaving the EU in the next five years had now risen to 50%. That may well be accurate. Yet UKIP’s victory simultaneously serves to show that the country is not so different from its European cousins after all—even if Mr Farage (presumably) does not see it in those terms.