I believe in Slovenia

Beppe Grillo of the Movimento Cinque Stelle, at a press conference.

As the world began fretting today over the fascist takeover of the European Parliament (which is not in fact going to happen, I'm glad to say; the elections results are bad and no doubt very embarrassing to a lot of people, especially in France and England, but there will be maybe 87 anti-Europe MEPs at the most out of the 751 total seats, not enough to bring the edifice down), it occurred to me that the election results provided the data for a little test of a hypothesis I'm interested in: the idea that high voter turnout tends to benefit the left but may also benefit the extreme right. Especially because nobody was talking about turnout except to observe, vapidly, that it was higher this year than in 2009 (43.1% overall compared to 43.0% last time, which is about as significant as—well, probably not very significant).

Anyway I found the results with turnout figures by country at the Parliament's own website, and used them to construct the chart below, which cost me many hours and probably brain cells that could have been useful as I slouch toward senility, and probably still contains some serious errors:

Country	Turnout (%)	Left + Green	Liberal + Right	Nativist	Off the Continuum
Belgium	90	10	10	1 (Vlaams Belang)	0
Luxembourg	90	2	4	0	0
Malta	74.8	4	2	0	0
Italy	60	34	22	5 (Lega Nord)	17 (Comedians)
Greece	58	12	5	4 (Chrysi Avgi, Anel)	0
Denmark	56.4	5	4	4 (Dansk Folkeparti)	0
Ireland	51.6	5	2	0	0
Sweden	48.8	10	7	0	0
Germany	47.9	43	38	8 (Alternative für Deutschland, NPD)	0
Spain	45.9	34	23	0	0
Austria	45.7	8	6	4 (Österreichische Freiheitspartei)	0
Lithuania	44.9	3	6	2 (Order and Justice)	0
Cyprus	44	4	2	0	0
France	43.5	23	27	24 (Front National)	0
Finland	40.9	4	4	3 (Finns Party)	0
Netherlands	37	7	13	8 (Party for Freedom, Christenunie)	0
Estonia	36.4	2	4	0	0
United Kingdom	36	23	20	24 (Ukip)	0
Bulgaria	35.5	4	13	0	0
Portugal	34.5	12	7	0	2 (monarchist Greens or worse)
Romania	32	17	15	0	0
Latvia	30	3	5	0	0
Hungary	28.9	6	12	3 (Jobbik)	0
Croatia	25	4	7	0	0
Slovenia	21	1	3	0	1 (believers in Eurovision)
Czech Rep.	19.5	7	13	1 (Svobodní)	0
Slovakia	13	4	9	0	0

This ranks the countries of the EU by voter turnout in these elections, from 90% for Belgium to a truly desperate 13% for Slovakia (still better, of course, than a school board election in the US) and then lays out the voting results in terms of number of seats won, broken down by tendency and my own dangerous arithmetic (that's where the errors would be).

 ("Liberal" means liberal in the 19th-century sense, like the English Liberal Democrats or German FDP;  where it says "nativist" I originally had "fascist" but decided that was possibly a tad unfair.)

So, if you divide into three groups of nine countries each you find a pattern: out of the top nine countries (about 48% turnout and up), five or just about 56% were won decisively by the left; out of the next nine (36% to 46% turnout), three or 33% went left; and of the bottom nine (13% to 35.5%), two or 22% went left.

Or with an alternative model

• High turnout (above 50%) 4 out of 7 left (57%)
• Medium turnout (40 to 49%) 2 out of 8 left (25%)
• Low turnout (30 to 39%) 2 out of 7 left (28%)
• Very low turnout (below 30%) 0 out of 5 left (0%)

There are a few different ways of slicing it, and they all give you about the same result; the left was not terribly likely to win these elections anywhere, but success for the left and higher turnout were pretty clearly associated, and success for the nativists does not appear to be associated with turnout at all.

This is NOT AN ACTUAL STUDY (watch out, Brooksie! you can reknot your necktie now), which would need to consider the voting percentages rather than the number of seats and would best be done in conjunction with looks at the elections of 2004 and 2009; merely a little demo of how such a study could work. But it is pretty suggestive.

Update:

I'm not totally sure if I'm getting this right, by the way, but I think the Verjamem Party got its start when Eva Boto's song, the Slovenian entry at the 2012 Eurovision competition in Baku, lost, and angry Slovenes decided that all their current political parties were inadequate to right this injustice.