Election Special: European Election General Results

After several anxious days wait voters can finally discover the results of the 2009 vote - the Eurovision Song Contest it was not!

For the multi-lingual among readers, why not try your interpretation skills through the official results service.

BBC provides several information pages detailing the make-up of the new 735-seat European Parliament which will make decisions on every citizen's behalf for the next four years.

The EPP centre-right bloc is now the largest group across the European Union with 266 seats, followed by the 'Socialists' with 184, the liberal ALDI with 83, the 'no-group' anti-bloc with 72, Greens (including the SNP and Plaid Cymru) with 50, the united 'Left' wing parties (including Sinn Fein) with 36, UEN (including the BNP) with 25 and the Independence bloc (including Ukip) with 21 seats.

The BBC also provides matching coverage of the pure UK voting figures, while the official European Parliament page (in English) gives a breakdown of results as they were declared by region and the MEPs elected as representatives.

The proportion of votes received were as follows (collected opinion polls in brackets):

Conservative - 28.6% (28%), 24 seats
Ukip - 17.4% (15%), 13 seats
Labour - 15.3% (17%), 11 seats
LibDem - 13.9% (15%), 10 seats
Green - 8.7% (10%), 2 seats
BNP - 6.5% (5%), 2 seats

The Guardian's Datablog gives a comprehensive breakdown of the voting split in the European elections according to every local authority in the country.