Europe elections live: polls to close in Poland, Portugal and Romania on ‘Super Sunday'
Show key events only Please turn on JavaScript to use this feature Show key events only Please turn on JavaScript to use this feature Jakub Krupa
Dobry wieczór, boa noite, bună seara,
or simply good evening and welcome to our live coverage of Super Sunday in Europe with crucial elections in Poland, Portugal, and Romania.
It's Jakub Krupa here, in Warsaw, to guide you through tonight's exit polls, snap reactions and early results coming from the three EU countries. Join The Guardian for Europe's electoral 'super Sunday' – video
We will start with Romania where the polls will close in about half an hour – 7pm BST, 8pm CEST, 9pm local time – followed by Poland and Portugal an hour later.
It may take a little while before we get any conclusive results though as margins are expected to be fairly thin.
But, but, but – don't worry! We will bring you all the key updates: starting with exit polls, through snap reactions and late polls, all the way to first analyses and official results.
I'll bring you updates from our correspondents across Europe, including Jon Henley and Sam Jones who followed the campaigns in Romania and Portugal, and Jennifer Rankin in Brussels.
Ready? Let's go. Share
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
Europeans back higher defence spending amid Russia threat, poll finds
Faced with an unpredictable Donald Trump and an aggressive Russia, Europeans favour increased spending on defence and, in some countries, compulsory military service. A survey of 12 countries for the European Council on Foreign Relations showed majorities for increased defence spending in Poland (70%), Denmark (70%) and the UK (57%). Support was softer elsewhere, but large minorities in Germany (47%), Spain (46%) and France (45%) also backed bigger military budgets. Italy was an outlier: only 17% favoured higher spending, with 57% against. Europeans in several countries supported reintroducing mandatory military service, with the crucial exception of 18- to 29-year-olds – those most likely to be called up in any armed conflict. People in France (62%), Germany (53%) and Poland (51%) were the strongest supporters of military service. Opposition to the idea outweighed support in countries including Italy (50% against), the UK (53%), Spain (56%) and Hungary (58%). Older people were keenest on the draft. In Germany, for example, a net total of 49% of over-70s supported military service, while a net total of 46% of 18- to 29-year-olds opposed the idea. The research also found the European public divided sharply over Trump, whose return to the US presidency has scrambled traditional allegiances to Washington. Countries with traditionally strong ties with the US are becoming increasingly sceptical of the US system: in the UK and Germany, majorities of 74% and 67% think it is broken. 'EU-US relations are now increasingly ideological,' the ECFR's Ivan Krastev and Mark Leonard wrote in a paper to accompany the findings. 'In many respects the relations of the far-right parties to Trump start to resemble the relationship of former communist parties to the Soviet Union in the cold war. They feel obliged to defend Trump and to imitate him.' European far-right parties, which often took inspiration from Vladimir Putin's Russia, now look to Trump's system as a model, the authors suggest. In contrast, voters for mainstream parties are critical of Trump and the US political system. Far-right and national populist allegiance to Trump exists, despite sizeable minorities of voters for those parties seeing his re-election as bad news for Americans. For instance, 34% of AfD voters in Germany, 28% of France's National Rally supporters and 30% of Reform UK voters consider Trump's re-election as 'very bad' or 'rather bad' for Americans. The findings come on the eve of a Nato summit this week where members of the alliance will be asked to raise defence spending to at least 5% of GDP a year by 2032. Spain has already rejected the target as 'unreasonable' and 'counterproductive'. Italy wants to delay the deadline until 2035. Voters in most countries polled are sceptical that Europe can be independent of the US. Citizens in Germany, Spain, Poland and Italy were more likely to say it would be very difficult or practically impossible for the EU to become independent of the US in defence and security. Only in Denmark did a slim majority (52%) consider it was possible for the EU to achieve autonomy in defence and security. Denmark, which is directly threatened by Trump's claims over Greenland, also showed the highest antipathy towards the US president: 86% believe the US political system is broken, while 76% rated Trump's re-election as a bad thing for US citizens. Several European publics support developing an alternative national nuclear deterrent that does not rely on the US, with the strongest support in Poland (60%), Portugal (62%) and Spain (54%). In Germany, support for such an idea was only 39%. The chancellor, Friedrich Merz, has proposed that his country could share nuclear weapons with France and Britain but also said this could not replace the US's protective shield over much of Europe. Sign up to Headlines Europe A digest of the morning's main headlines from the Europe edition emailed direct to you every week day after newsletter promotion In an encouraging sign for Kyiv, most Europeans oppose following the US if Trump pushes Ukraine to cede occupied territories or lifts economic sanctions against Russia. Even in Hungary, which has a government that has consistently slowed agreement on EU sanctions, 40% oppose copying any US move to lift sanctions, while 38% were in favour. In other countries there were strong majorities against emulating any pro-Russia policy on Ukraine that may come from the US. The report's authors suggest two explanations for this support for Ukraine. 'A benevolent interpretation is that Europeans support an autonomous European policy to support Ukraine and they don't want to blindly follow Trump's lead. But another reading of that data is that Europeans want Ukrainians to continue fighting on their behalf.' Leonard said: 'Our poll shows that Europeans feel unsafe and that Trump is driving demand for increased defence spending, the reintroduction of military service and an extension of nuclear capabilities across much of Europe.' Krastev, who is chair of the Centre for Liberal Strategies, said: 'The real effect of Trump's second coming is that the United States now presents a credible model for Europe's far right. To be pro-American today mostly means to be sceptical of the EU; to be pro-European means being critical of Trump's America.' Pollsters commissioned by ECFR spoke to 16,440 adults last month.
Telegraph
19 hours ago
- Telegraph
This is why Reform is on the cusp of victory
New polling by Ipsos-Mori has Reform on 34 points, currently heading for a working majority in Parliament at the next election. If this came to pass, it would mark the most extraordinary result in British politics in at least a century. Can we really trust polls like these? Let us consider reasons to be sceptical. The first is that all polls like this – standard, nationally representative surveys of a few thousand voters – only capture national vote share. They do not project the corresponding outcome of seats. While we can make rudimentary assumptions of a party's likely representation in Parliament, they are still assumptions. A 34 per cent vote share would return a huge number of seats, but we cannot know whether the spread of votes would be broad enough to secure the number of seats implied by this poll. A party might receive 34 per cent of the vote share, but their support might be concentrated in small geographical areas. In such circumstances, Britain's 'first-past-the-post' electoral system would limit them to a small number of seats. We know Reform will get little support in the big cities; this will artificially inflate Labour's seats next time and limit Reform's. The second reason to be sceptical of these polls is that, this far out from an election, they cannot be treated seriously as predictions. Polls are merely snapshots of public opinion at an exact moment in time. Things were different three months ago; they will be different in three months from now. Sometimes, with polls like this, there is a third reason to be sceptical: you get 'rogue' polls which put one party in an unusually high or low position. Sometimes polls randomly tap into a sample which is out-of-line with public opinion for some reason. This is why you must consider the average of all polls of a given period, and also consider whether polls reflect trends. In considering this specific point, let us now flip the analysis back over. Let us consider why this poll should be taken seriously: there are several reasons to do so. You cannot credibly write this poll off as 'rogue'. This result of 34 per cent broadly reflects other polls coming out at the moment. While it is a little higher, it is not much higher, and it confirms a clear trend that Reform is on the march. It obviously also reflects recent election results. At the mix of national and local elections in May, Reform secured a new MP, a new Mayor and a raft of new councillors across the country. They received 31 per cent of the vote share in the local elections. Ipsos-Mori's poll merely puts Reform on a slightly higher vote share than they secured several weeks ago in real elections. You must always take polls seriously if they reflect what is coming out in focus groups at the same time. Ed Shackle, Public First's head of qualitative research, confirms this to be the case. All the current momentum is with Reform. He notes that, while you used to get some hesitation from voters about admitting they were considering a Reform vote, this is gone now. People increasingly sense that Reform is surging, and it is exciting to get on the bandwagon. While Reform is surging in less-affluent areas on the coast and in towns and small cities across provincial England, their support is up across the board in the focus groups. They are currently hoovering-up most of the votes of disaffected people across the country. This recent polling result has also come after a wave of stories on issues where Reform is strong: immigration and crime, most notably. For the last few weeks, the media has been awash with stories of grooming gangs, serious crimes alleged to have been committed by asylum-seekers, the continued arrival of small boats, and all the rest. This cannot but help Reform's standing in the polls. While I am personally sceptical of anyone's ability to make a judgement on the national mood based on their own personal, random conversations, when these conversations are entirely in line with the polls, you have to wonder. And the conversations I have with ordinary people in my own personal life confirms that huge numbers of people are seriously thinking about voting for Reform. Overall, then, we should take this poll seriously; Reform is very obviously the most popular party in the country at this moment. But we still have four more years before the next election and an awful lot will change. Above all, given their recent record, it is reasonable to assume Reform will blow themselves up with internal rows and blatant incompetence. If they can make it through to the end of this year in a similar polling position but without a terrible internal trauma, it will be worth taking them very seriously.
The National
a day ago
- The National
Ruth Wishart: Anti-abortion movement is well-funded and gunning for us
Her doctors and a midwife said such a course of action would be illegal under the then Irish law whilst a foetal heartbeat was detectable. Savita was just 31 when she died of sepsis in 2018. In the furore which followed, Ireland voted overwhelmingly to ditch the legal clause which prevented abortion. But it took six long years to pass the new amendment which did so. It became part of the Irish Republic's journey to unlock the stranglehold the church had previously held over the law, and subsequently, in 2015, another amendment endorsed same-sex marriage. READ MORE: Scottish Government announces £3 million in funding for 14 festivals More recently, when the US Democratic legislator Melissa Hortman and her husband were murdered by a self-styled evangelical 'Christian' earlier this month, police found a list of some 70 other potential victims in his vehicle. The link they shared is that they had all been vocally pro-choice. You might imagine it was enough for these ultras that they had killed off Roe v Wade in 2022, the landmark ruling which gave federal rights to termination in every US state. Evidently not. Since that ended, we have had tragic instances of rape, child and incest victims being forced to carry to full term, women bleeding to death in hospitals, and the better-heeled having to take flights to that handful of states which didn't take advantage of the new legal landscape and kept women's rights safe. It's almost as if all the male legislators who hollered loud and long for women to stay pregnant no matter the circumstances, collectively believed that all these pregnancies were somehow the result of immaculate conceptions. Unsurprisingly, there is not a four-deep queue of rogue fathers volunteering their financial or indeed any support. Men rule OK? Last week in the Commons, the weaker of two possible amendments was passed which 'allowed' women who self-terminated pregnancies, perhaps via online medication, to avoid prosecution. It did not exempt any medical staff who may have been involved. The author of the second, stronger amendment wrote in The Guardian that the House had chickened out of proper reform and had been altogether too timid. Yet again, some of the loudest voices raised in defence of the legal status quo belonged to men. Blokes like Tory Edward Leigh, whose features have always looked as if he were on the verge of apoplexy or worse. These men also have one thing in common. They will never, ever be pregnant. Which doesn't prevent them from telling women what they should think, or whether or not they should control their own fertility. So there is absolutely no reason to suppose that Scotland or the UK is safe from American lobbying. Just look at what happened when a modest law from Gillian Mackay MSP was passed stopping the Texan-based 40 Days For Life group assembling nearer than 200 metres from any facility offering terminations. Some commentators have suggested all they were doing was praying. Puleeze. Some of the professional posters displayed had come straight from the source of the protesting. Including pictures of aborted foetuses. And there was much shouting, not just at women but at the medical staff who worked there. READ MORE: Kate Forbes: Numbers prove that the world is ignoring those who talk Scotland down When a woman in her 70s was arrested, but never brought to court, she was immediately given heroine status by some US 'freedom of speech' groups. She had been picketing near Glasgow's Queen Elizabeth University Hospital, though not, to be fair shouting, and was demanding her 'right' to go to court despite the Procurator Fiscal recommending no further action. This is all of a piece with the well-funded, Europe-wide anti-abortion protesters who all demand their day in court to rubbish any laws to which they've taken exception. Rose Docherty's arrest, following police warnings about trespassing in buffer zones, came just days after the US vice-president, JD Vance, made a series of totally false accusations about the Scottish laws, including the assertion that people could be in trouble for privately praying in their own home. And referencing 'thought police'. All garbage of course, but not atypical of the current US administration's legendary inability to check their facts before their mouth is engaged. People who think getting rid of Donald Trump would herald a new relationship with the truth might consider that Vance is the constitutional heir apparent. Which is not to say that legitimate protest should ever be outlawed, including protests with which we fundamentally disagree. The Scottish legislation on buffer zones mentions the where of protest, but not the why. Its principal proposer received both death threats and abuse despite being pregnant herself. Nevertheless, it was the Irish nation rising up and voting for change which brought about two civilising laws in that country where the church had long held too much sway. Even in America, there are signs that decent folks are awakening from the slumber which brought us a second Trump term with all the many and increasingly obvious dangers that represents. Non-Elon-Musk-related social media is awash with images of a poorly attended military parade which 'happened' to coincide with the president's 79th birthday and contrasting these images with the millions across the USA who turned out for No Kings Day. The latter was a public riposte to Trump supposing that his presidential status gave him monarchical powers to do as he pleased. An assertion which followed a Time magazine cover this month featuring a back view of 'Trump' looking into a mirror where he wore a crown and lots of ermine. By long-standing Time artist Tim O'Brien, it was entitled King Me. The idea that the man who treats executive orders like bulk-bought confetti should be left to his own fantasies managed to unite and enrage millions of people, some of whom had sat on their hands on the day of the election. Hell mend them. It's become difficult enough to vote in America as it is without ignoring the hard-fought right to vote for which people once died. These barriers to polling rights have also crossed the pond, with new demands to present ID at polling stations despite there being minimalist evidence of voter fraud. No prizes for guessing which group is least likely to have a passport or driving licence. So we must stay alert at all times to prevent our own rules, regulations and values from being altered by foreign voices. Apart from Vance, Musk has also weighed in with his views on the UK Prime Minister and much else. The irony is that Musk himself is a migrant from South Africa, but the breath is not being held for those cuddly chaps from the US Immigration and Enforcement agency to deport him as they now have so many long-standing Americans who 'look foreign' (which is ICE speak for being brown.) If you think they're licensed thugs, you're not wrong. Meanwhile round about us, the world appears to be hellwards bound in any available handcart. There are many theories about why Trump is planning to take a fortnight before deciding whether or not to give more support to Israel by providing the necessary aircraft and their so-called 'bunker-busting' bombs to reach buried Iranian nuclear sites. I know the US president isn't much of a reader, but could I recommend several tomes which detail the effect of unleashing radio active materials from such sites? Not that he cares. It's a reasonably safe bet that the prevailing winds won't carry the nasties to the eastern seaboard in America. The bit that houses hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians. Like Gaza, really.
