By some wonderful magic, all media reports of an event tend to go with the same storyline, often kind of off. The storyline after the elections was “The right and anti-immigrant parties win big.”

Figuring out if it was accurate took some work, because some parties, for example the Tories and the Italian Democratic Party, plan to change caucuses and the official results site counts them as unattached. I had to do a lot of very tedious counting and adding up to make this post, the kind of thing journalists need us bloggers to do. I’ve assigned most nominally unattached parties to a group. This is based on known plans plus a few educated guesses, but the guesses mostly involve tiny parties.

As it turns out, PES+greens+commie parties will go from a combined 38, 3% of seats in 2004 to 36,2%.

If we count the liberals (reasonable-ish in the Parliament context), the present mainstream right went from a combined 55,0% of seats to 56,2%.

By my count, 2% of the old parliament’s non-inscrits were extreme nationalists, and 3,1% of the new parliament’s.

Results by group:

EPP-ED+UEN parties (including the Tories and ODS and Law) 44,2% of seats. (42,3% in the old parliament)

Counting them separately is pointless since they’re about to merge and split. This process of musical chairs tend to happen after every election.

* ALDE/ADLE: 10,9%. (12,6%).
They’re the liberal group (well, basically). The members parties mostly line up as center-right domestically, but some are center-left or just vaguely centrist.

* PES 25,2% (27, 6%)
Worse than it seems, because all parts of Italy’s Democratic Party, which didn’t exist in 04 is included in my count.

*Greens/EFA 7,1% (5,5%)
Impressive considering the many countries with no green representation

*GUE/NGL 4,5% (5,2%)
This is the far left

ID, the eurosceptic group went from 2, 8% to 2, 6%

So the storyline’s not flat wrong, but the changes aren’t very dramatic.