Voters in Sweden and Finland overwhelmingly chose people rather than politics in the European Parliament elections, boosting centre-right parties in the process.
Finnish political analysts attribute the success of the Conservative Party - up by 5 per cent from the previous 1996 elections - in part to a local celebrity, the former racing car champion Mr Ari Vatanen.
Mr Vatanen, a 47-year-old political novice, said he does not intend to "make empty election promises" but to "build bridges between the common people in Europe's underprivileged regions".
Finland's Conservative Party garnered 26.1 per cent of the vote and kept its four assembly seats, according to provisional results. As such, the party beat the Finnish Social Democrats, who took 17.8 per cent of the vote, losing one seat and ending up with only three in the assembly in which Finland has 16 seats.
But analysts saw votes for Mr Vatanen and Marjo Matikainen-Kallstroem, a former Olympic cross-country skier, as an indication of severe voter apathy. "The political dimension was almost entirely absent," Finnish political scientist Esko Antola said.
Finnish politicians lamented that absence. The Prime Minister, Mr Paavo Lipponen, blamed voter apathy on a poorly-informed electorate. He commented: "If you vote for a racing-car driver, you're not thinking about European politics."
Swedish political analysts credited a charismatic politician and mother of 10 (including some foster children), Marit Paulsen, with tripling the percentage won by the pro-EU Liberal Party - from 4.8 per cent in 1995 to 13.8 per cent on Sunday.
The small opposition party, which held only one seat in the outgoing assembly, will now send three deputies to Brussels. The rival Social Democrats still won the lion's share of the votes - 26.1 per cent - but lost one seat, bringing their number to six of the 22 Sweden controls.
This had centre-right Liberal supporters celebrating what they called "the Paulsen effect." At 59, this writer, former fisheries worker and welder, is credited with promoting a clear party line, pushing in particular for Sweden to join the European single currency zone.
In promoting strong institutions in Brussels "against the grain," wrote the daily Dagens Nyheter, Ms Paulsen "has made her party's platform credible and whittled down Swedish Euroscepticism".