European elections: final votes cast as EU awaits results

Voting for the next European Parliament has concluded and we are waiting for the official results to be announced.
For more on this and other news around the world, let's turn to our Hong Yoo.
Yoo, we are starting to get a picture of the early results. What do we know so far?


Well,... the European Parliament has published a projection of the European Parliament for 2019 to 2024 as we await the official results.
It looks like the two centrist groups -- the European People's Party and the Progressive Alliance of Socialist and Democrats -- that have dominated Europe's politics for years have lost a total of 81 seats to smaller parties.
With these two parties losing their joint majority for the first time, the influence of nationalists and populist forces is likely to increase.
The Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe and Renaissance is predicted to have picked up 33 seats and the Euroskeptic political group Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy 14 seats.
Once the 9th European Parliament is formed, the 28 leaders of the EU member states will start their discussions on who will be the next president of the European Commission, the bloc's executive arm.
So there will be lots of horse-trading in the next weeks about who gets which top job and all of the various commissioners need the approval of the European Parliament.
While historically turnout has been relatively low, this year the European Parliament says voters were much more engaged with polls showing the turnout rate at 51 percent according to preliminary results.
Over 350 million people across the 28 countries of the European Union were eligible to vote.