The end of the first full day of voting in the 2009 European Parliament elections saw jubilation among Geert Wilders’ far-right Party for Freedom as exit polls forecast it would take four of the Netherlands’ 25 seats, while the UK, which also voted on June 4, witnessed new pressure against Labour leader and prime minister Gordon Brown as another cabinet member quit.
 
In the Netherlands, exit polling by market research firm Synovate for Dutch television NOS and ANP news agency gave prime minister Jan Peter Balkenende’s Christian Democrats five seats – with about 20 per cent of the vote - and Wilders’ party four, one ahead of Balkenende’s ruling coalition partner, Labour.
 
Voter turnout in the Netherlands European Parliament election was estimated at 40 per cent.
 
Wilders, who has based his European Parliament campaign on messages against Islam in Europe, against Turkey ever being admitted to the EU and to Bulgaria and Romania being evicted from the bloc – messages now said to have got his party about 15 per cent of the vote, has said that he would not take up a seat in the European Parliament.
 
The exit poll forecast, if proven true, would mean that Balkenende’s party has lost two seats and Labour four. The pro-European Liberal Democrats D66 were said by the exit poll to be poised to get three seats, triple their current number.
 
The poll gave Groenlinks and conservative Christian parties two seats each. Animal rights party PvdD could possibly get one seat, the exit poll said.
 
As his party celebrated its gains, Wilders described the outcome as a vote against a bloated and expensive EU and against Balkenende’s governing coalition.
 
In the UK, where the Labour Party was widely believed to be in for a thrashing and anti-Brown media portrayed the party leader and prime minister as virtually in hiding as British voters went to the polls, work and pensions secretary James Purnell announced his resignation and urged Brown to step aside.
 
While the expenses scandal in the UK was believed ahead of the vote as likely to damage Tories as well – if perhaps not as much – as Labour, and in the face of expected gains by the British National Party and UK Independence Party – Brown has insisted of late that he would not resign and was the best person to manage the country in the face of the economic crisis.
 
The scandal has accounted for a number of senior politicians, and Brown – unless he changes his mind about quitting – already had been forced towards a cabinet reshuffle by two previous resignations and by the scandal extending to chancellor of the exchequer Alistair Darling.
 
Purnell, in a letter to the Sun and the Times, said that Brown's continued leadership of the party made a Tory victory at the next general election "more not less likely".
 
The BBC reported senior Labour backbencher Barry Sheerman as saying, as polls closed in the UK elections for the European Parliament – along with some local voting - that there should be a ballot of Labour MPs to see if Brown still had the confidence of the party.
 
Sheerman told the BBC: "Many of my colleagues, all over the Palace of Westminster, are e-mailing each other and phoning each other. This goes far beyond just a few people, this is a large number of us who are really unhappy about the present situation.
 
"We would love to have a secret ballot so that we can express our views in the confidence that there would be no recriminations whatever way the vote went," Sheerman said.
 
The European Parliament elections will see Ireland and the Czech Republic vote on June 5. Latvia, Cyprus, Malta, Slovakia and Italy will vote on Saturday. The remaining 18 countries, including Bulgaria, will choose their MEPs on June 7.