Europe kicked off its mammoth parliamentary elections today, with Britain and the Netherlands going to the polls in a vote that is expected to see a swing towards populist right-wing parties.
The elections, which are spread over four days in the EU's 28 member states, are set to produce major gains for anti-immigration parties that are bent on dismantling the European Union from the inside.
The vote, for which some 400 million Europeans are eligible to cast their ballots, comes as the EU struggles for relevance in the aftermath of the eurozone crisis and grapples with the chaos on its borders in Ukraine.
"The immigration floodgate needs shutting - how can you bring more people over if there's not enough jobs for your own people?" James Donaghy, 66, told AFP as he voted for the UK Independence Party (UKIP) in Sevenoaks, southeast England.
Polls opened at 1100 IST in the Netherlands and 1130 IST in Britain. Ireland and the Czech Republic vote tomorrow, Latvia, Malta and Slovakia on Saturday, and the other 21 EU nations on Sunday.
When the results are announced on Sunday, eurosceptic parties may top the polls in Britain, France, Italy and the Netherlands.
The anti-immigration and anti-EU UKIP, led by Nigel Farage, and Geert Wilders' virulently anti-Islam Party of Freedom (PVV) in the Netherlands, are both forecast to make big gains.
UKIP's rise has rocked the British political establishment as a party without a single seat in its national parliament heads into the European election ahead of the main opposition Labour Party, according to polls in the Times and the Daily Mail newspapers today.
The party's rise was seen as a factor in Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron's pledge to hold a referendum on Britain's membership of the EU in late 2017.
Farage, a former commodities trader who likes to hold court with journalists in the pub, has ruled out joining a far-right bloc of Wilders' party and France's National Front, led by Marine Le Pen, saying the National Front is anti-Semitic.
As he cast his vote in a village school, Farage rejected claims of racism against his own party and said he wanted to cause a political "earthquake".
"If we get what we like, things will never be quite the same again," he told reporters.
Farage also predicted the highest turnout in European elections since the first in 1979, despite the fact that the figure dropped from 62 per cent at that vote to just 43 per cent in the last election in 2009.
