At first sight, the losses sustained by the left and centre-left in the European elections would not appear to constitute a landslide. After all, the Social Democrats will remain the second largest bloc in the European Parliament, after the parties of the centre right. But what may change is the way in which the parliament takes decisions.

Here in the Netherlands, the right-wing Freedom Party was one of the big winners in the European elections, yet analysts were quick to point out that with only four out of the 736 seats in the European Parliament (EP) it won't be able to achieve much on its own - party leader Geert Wilders having already said that he doesn't intend to join any of the existing coalitions in the parliament.

By the same token, left-wing parties may have lost spectacularly in countries such as the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, but because they are part of a coalition - some of whose other members, like the Greek socialists, actually made gains in the elections - the consequences of their losses have ended up being somewhat limited. As a result, the social-democratic PES bloc will remain the second largest grouping in the EP despite those losses, with only the centre-right EPP (European People's Party) bloc beating it in terms of numbers of seats.

Coalitions
Coalitions are important when it comes, for example, to deciding who is to chair parliamentary committees. Positions like these are ideally suited to raising the profile of political parties, even in the case of smaller parties such as the Netherlands' GreenLeft party, which has just three seats in the new parliament. Joost Lagendijk of GreenLeft has, for example, been the person presiding of the rather important Turkey committee for the last few years.

On top of this, the PES and the EPP often form a broad and overwhelming majority when it comes to parliamentary votes on key issues. They often prefer to come to a mutual compromise prior to such decisions being taken rather than risk seeing key issues approved or rejected by just a slim majority either way.

In the past this practice has often led to criticism that European decisions are in fact a foregone conclusion and that there is no real democracy within the European Parliament.

New bloc?
In the case of such compromises, independent members of the European Parliament (MEPs) play no role at all. However, never before have so many new, independent MEPs - i.e. politicians who do not belong to or are not set to join one of the existing political coalitions - been elected as have been in these elections. In most cases these are MEPs who represent nationalist or euro-sceptic parties, or parties which combine those two elements.

In theory these MEPs could get together to form a brand new bloc which - given their number - would immediately count as the EP's third largest. However, in recent years it has become clear that, for example, Romanian nationalists and Italian nationalists find it difficult to get along with each other even though they each have an equally negative opinion of 'Brussels' and all that stands for.

Nevertheless smaller parties can in some cases tip the scales between a 'yes' and a 'no' decision. This is particularly so when it comes to secret votes, when the members of the large coalitions also have an opportunity to go against the grain and vote differently to their coalition colleagues without fear of any negative consequences.

Dissidents
Yes, even these large blocs in the EP have 'dissident' MEPs in their ranks - ones with disguised or blatant euro-sceptical tendencies. And these last elections have produced even more of this type of MEPs. Take, for example, the British Conservative Party or the party of Czech President Vaclav Klaus. Officially, both these parties are members of the EPP, although they are now considering the possibility of establishing a separate, new coalition with reform of the European Union as its main objective.

As it is, the European Parliament cannot draft new laws. But when it comes to 'yes' and 'no' decisions about further European integration, the small parties can indeed have a role to play, for a secret vote can be forced with the support of just one fifth of the total number of MEPs.

Given the new composition of the European Parliament it seems, therefore, a lot less likely that the two main blocs - the centre-right conservatives/Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats - will be able to go on ruling the roost on every single issue quite as much as they have done in the past.