Euro MEP elected without vote

[Fisher_Gate]

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@ Fisher Gate. Regarding Italy, you are right the Olive Tree didn't exist in 1979. But the SVP always do deal with the Italian social democrats. Otherwise they'd NEVER get into the European Parliament unless there were old UK sized single memeber constituencies.

No don't agree - the SVP get in because they pass the electoral threshold in the North West Italy Constituency. No doubt this is because many voters in South Tyrol itself vote for them, even though they would support other parties for the government, as the SVP has no expressed ideology or programme - its only aim is to represent German speakers living in the Italian annexed part of Tyrol. Clearly that is why in terms of Italian national politics, they tend to be aligned with social democratic groupings and in the case of the 2004 elections formed a pre-election pact with Olive Tree - unfortunately I haven't seen the constituency results anywhere to help understand this. But they have got into the European Parliament in previous years (and I have the detailed data for 1979 which I quoted from) on the basis of the extreme proportionality of the electoral system, and their very localised though not insignificant votes, some of which may be 'borrowed' from normally social democrat voters.