Elections for the European parliament are a uniquely multi-national exercise in democracy, but they rarely manage to look more than a series of simultaneous national votes. So it was in the latest polls, with voters and candidates mostly motivated by national issues, not what they want parliament to do.

The political fringes naturally benefit from this parochialism. In several countries, voters suffering from the economic crisis were drawn to the xenophobic right, which offered a facile way to punish the ruling establishment without – in many voters’ perception – the actual cost of having to be governed by the protest parties.