LONDON: Dissatisfaction with national economies and the war in Iraq, as well as a continent-wide malaise over the status quo, caused voters to rebuff established parties in the just-completed European Parliament elections , analysts said on Monday.

In Britain, officials with Prime Minister Tony Blair's Labour Party - which also suffered losses in local council elections on Thursday - said the party was paying a price for its decision to lead the country into war to oust Saddam Hussein, but predicted that the people would return to Labour when the next general election rolls around.

Both Labour and its chief rival, the Conservative Party, were embarrassed by the upstart UK Independence Party, which got 17 per cent of the European Parliament vote in Britain running on a platform of withdrawing the nation from the European Union.

Its total matched the pro-European Liberal Democrats, traditionally Britain's third party. Labour drew 19 per cent and 27 per cent voted for the Conservatives.

UKIP will have 12 seats in the new European Parliament, compared with its current three. It will be the dominant "Eurosceptic" party in the continent-wide assembly, which divides its time between Brussels, Belgium, and the French city of Strasbourg.

"The British public are fed up with the old parties. They are fed up with being talked to in that simplistic manner," said Robert Kilroy-Silk, a former BBC announcer and talk-show host who has led the UKIP's resurgence.

"They want their country back from Brussels, and we are going to get it back for them." British media declared the vote a defeat for the status quo as well as a victory for those who oppose greater European integration.

The news came during a week when European leaders are hoping to craft a constitution for the EU with the proper balance of powers between the organization and its member states.

The results are likely to stiffen Blair's resolve to retain a right of veto in key policy areas such as defence and foreign affairs. "This is the first British election, national or European, in which the combined (Eurosceptic) vote has outweighed that of the pro-Brussels parties," said London's conservative-leaning Daily Telegraph.

Eurosceptics and nationalists did well in several nations during the poll that took place on Thursday in some countries and over the weekend in others. In Belgium, a far-right party, Vlaams Blok, came in second place, while in Sweden the new Junilistan, a party critical of Brussels, came in third.

Although Britain posted the sharpest anti-establishment vote, governing parties in Germany, France and Poland also suffered in what was billed as the largest transnational democratic election ever, choosing more than 700 members of the European Parliament.

Voters appeared apathetic, with just 45 per cent of the 25 EU member nations' 350 million voters participating. Some of the lowest participation levels were in the 10 countries admitted to the union a month ago.

In the largest of them, Poland, only one- fifth of the voters cast a ballot, and the governing leftist party got only 9 per cent of the total. In Germany, Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's governing Social Democrats got only 22 per cent of the vote amid worries about the economy.

Mr Schroeder was frank about the outcome: "We can't gloss over the result. We've taken a clear defeat." In Italy, where voter turnout was among the highest, the right-wing party of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi suffered significant, but not devastating, losses.

But in Spain and Greece, with recently elected governments, the ruling parties did well in the vote. Italian voters apparently were angry with Mr Berlusconi for his support of the Bush administration and the war in Iraq and were uneasy over high unemployment, analysts said.

Italian pollsters had predicted that the rescue of three Italian hostages held by Iraqi insurgents for two months would boost Mr Berlusconi's electoral fortunes. The hostages were freed four days before the elections. -Dawn/The LAT-WP News Service (c) The Los Angeles Times.