This article was originally written for the Swedish pro-European website, www.europafederalisterna.se.

In much of Europe the talk during the European elections was of low turnout and the public not bothering to vote. As you would expect, in Britain we were ahead of everyone else in being sceptical about Europe: the 1999 European election campaign was dominated by newspapers predicting that nobody was going to bother to vote, and sure enough turnout hit a record bottom of 23%.

This time it was different, and turnout was better. Part of the reason was that local elections were postponed from their usual time of early May until 10 June, to coincide with the European elections. In London there was also a hard-fought battle for the Mayor of London. The fact that it wasn’t only about Europe helped to increase turnout.

But the real story of these elections in Britain was the remarkable rise of the UK Independence Party.

This in turn was in large part due to their recruiting at the start of the campaign a man called Robert Kilroy-Silk, who until the start of the year was the presenter of a very long-running daytime TV chat show (think low-grade Jerry Springer; he was eventually sacked by the BBC for making some very offensive remarks about Palestinians). He is a very superficial character, but as you would expect presents very well on television, and was the most high-profile personality of the campaign.

But if Kilroy was the front man, the real reason for UKIP’s success was that the British people, after years of being drip-fed by the newspapers every day about how evil the European Union is, finally had a chance to vote for an explicitly anti-European political party. Although UKIP itself is actually in favour of the UK withdrawing from the EU, market research shows that at least half the people who voted for it are not particularly in favour of withdrawal – they just wanted to register a protest against the EU.

The success of UKIP could potentially have some quite far-reaching effects on British politics. Although no-one believes that they will do nearly as well in any other elections, they still have the potential to take significant numbers of votes from the Conservative party in a General Election. And under Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system, which doesn’t allow for any coalitions, or second-preference votes, if you split your vote between two parties, it is fatal. It is ironic that UKIP’s success, and the potentially devastating impact on the Conservative Party, has been caused by the Conservatives, who in recent years have been the anti-European party in Britain, not being anti-European enough. For until UKIP came along, the Conservatives’ new leader, had been trying to move his party back towards more moderate ground, which meant being anti-European, but supporting Britain remaining a part of the EU. In a funny kind of way the success of UKIP has been caused by the fact that for the first time since 1945, none of the main British political parties are against being part of the EU. Voters who wanted to register a protest had to vote for UKIP.

Commentators found it a very difficult election to summarise. As in many European countries, the vote of the main governing party fell (Labour’s vote share was down around 10%). But so did the vote of the main opposition party – the Conservative vote fell by a similar amount. A new and very strongly anti-European party suddenly appeared on the scene, coming from nowhere to get a significant share of the vote. But the vote of the only solidly pro-European party, the Liberal Democrats, also rose slightly.

There is no question that the campaign in Britain was fought on national issues – primarily opposition to the Government’s support for the war in Iraq – and to a lesser extent on the question of the national attitude towards the EU. But just what that vote actually means seems very unclear!