This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, May 27, 2014.

I'm Caleb Brown.

European Union elections have presided over the rise of authoritarian parties in some cases securing unprecedented numbers of seats.

Matthew Feeney, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute, breaks down the results from last week.

Broadly speaking, what can we say with confidence

about the various factions that have performed well in EU elections in the last week?

Well, we can say a number of different things.

The most important being that the success of authoritarian anti-immigrant parties suggests that many people

across different countries in the EU are upset about the EU establishment and the way it's been treating them.

That's one thing to say about parties like UKIP and the French National Front and

Yobik in Hungary. But there's also something to be said about the fact that front and

Yobik in Hungary. But there's also something to be said about the fact that the far left

has done very well and perhaps most notably in Greece where as listeners will be

aware there's been a huge sovereign debt crisis and there's

been economic hardship and some people have turned to the left as their saviors here.

They think growth in government will be the answer rather than austerity in markets.

So we're talking about broadly though authoritarian parties that want to place more in the hands of the

government.

Yeah, the barometer suggests in Europe that people like big government, whether it's for

nationalist reasons or for economic reasons.

Okay, so which parties specifically have made gains and what are their major gripes with how things have been?

Well, I think a party worth speaking about would be the United Kingdom Independence Party, which is called

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