EU elections: France’s Emmanuel Macron and Spain’s Pedro Sanchez meet to discuss top jobs and reject far-right as populists gain ground

French President Emmanuel Macron and Spain’s acting prime minister Pedro Sanchez met on Monday in Paris to discuss the results of the European parliamentary elections, Sanchez’s office said.

During a dinner in the Elysee Palace, the two leaders discussed the allocation of top jobs in parliament and their rejection of the far-right, it added.

“They also analysed the institutional renewal and they agree that new posts need to reflect the new majority in the European Parliament,” a statement of the Spanish PM office said.

The question of who should run the European Union’s executive branch was also the question on German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s mind on Monday.

The German leader said in her first comments on the election outcome that both her centre-right bloc and her centre-left coalition partners back the idea that the head of the EU’s executive Commission should be a politician who ran for that job.

Merkel said “we want to find a solution as quickly as possible, because the European Parliament will meet at the beginning of July and it would of course be desirable if there were already a proposal at that point” from heads of state and government.

The European Parliament elections delivered a fragmented result, with gains for Eurosceptic and green parties as the traditional mainstream groups took a hit.

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There were big wins for the Greens, who posted double digit scores across Europe’s biggest countries, and the Liberals, with both parties likely to play a major role in any future parliamentary coalition.

The main centre-right and centre-left groups lost their combined majority in the 751-seat parliament in the face of a challenge by Eurosceptic and nationalist forces of Marine Le Pen, Matteo Salvini and Nigel Farage – although the populist wave was less than some had predicted.

Each previous EU election since the first in 1979 has seen turnout fall, but figures from across the 28-nation bloc were at a 20-year high of 51 per cent, suggesting this year’s culture clash has mobilised both populists and those who oppose them.

Boosted by Macron’s Renaissance Movement, the Liberal ALDE group will finish with more than 100 seats, and it is expected to push hard to win the plum European Commission presidency for its candidate Margrethe Vestager.

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Britain will send a large contingent of Eurosceptic MEPs to a parliament they want to leave in a few months, after Farage’s single-issue Brexit Party trounced the main parties, while Salvini’s League was Italy’s biggest party and Le Pen’s National Rally squeaked ahead of Macron.

Holger Schmieding, chief economist at Berenberg bank, said the vote had left Europe “slightly more fragmented and polarised”, and there had been a shift from the two main groups to the liberals and greens, partly as a response to the rise of the populist right.

“To simplify a complex picture: whereas some voters care a lot about migration, many others see climate change as the key issue,” Schmieding wrote in a briefing note.

As the dust settles on the vote, attention now turns to the fight to land the top EU roles for the next five years: presidencies of the commission and the European Council, the speaker of parliament, the high representative for foreign policy and head of the European Central Bank.

These jobs will be picked by the national leaders of EU governments, with the first formal clash set for Tuesday, when they will meet for a summit dinner in Brussels.

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But Macron fired the starting pistol on the haggling Monday as he announced a series of one-on-one meetings with other leaders in the hours before the summit, notably Spain’s Sanchez – one of Sunday’s big winners – and Merkel.

Merkel has said she will back Manfred Weber, the lead candidate of the centre-right European People’s Party (EPP), which suffered significant losses but remained parliament’s biggest bloc with 180 seats.

But Macron is set against Weber – a long-standing MEP seen as lacking in charisma or appeal beyond the corridors of Brussels – and other national leaders share his scepticism.

With the centre-left Socialists and Democrats (S&D) projected to win 147 seats, down from 185, the two mainstream parties will no longer have a majority and will have to reach out to the liberals and greens to pass legislation – and approve a new commission president.

Sebastien Maillard of the Delors Institute said the mixed result of the election meant no political group was strong enough to force through their pick to succeed Jean-Claude Juncker at the head of the commission.

“No lead candidate can claim to have a majority, so that opens the game up,” Maillard said. “A man or woman must be found who has enough broad appeal that they can achieve a consensus between these forces.”

Across Europe, the various populist, Eurosceptic and right-wing parties won more than 150 seats between them, but with differing platforms and priorities, form no coherent parliamentary coalition.

The results have had a dramatic knock-on effect in domestic politics, with Germany’s Merkel forced to call crisis talks with her embattled coalition after suffering a drubbing at the polls, where the Greens beat junior government partner the Social Democratic Party to second place.

In Greece, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has called early elections after a thumping for his Syriza party, while Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz was ousted in a no-confidence vote on Monday.

Agence France-Presse and Reuters