The ruling UMP and Europe Ecology were the big winners of the European elections in France.

“The two parties who won this campaign are those who talked about European issues,” said Olivier Ubeda, representative for European Affairs from France's ruling UMP party.

Ubeda added that the other parties paid much more attention to “Sarkozy’s policies” when “we had to choose who is going to represent France in this European parliament”.

Alain Lipietz, an outgoing MEP from the Green Party, also shared this opinion. “The winners are the ones who were able to combine the response to social and ecological crisis within the framework of Europe," he said. He explained that the only parties who said that “the way out of the crisis is in Europe” were the UMP on one side and the Green Party on the other, and that people wanted to hear this message.

“Because they have internal problems and actually the Socialist Party doesn’t exist anymore,” said Stefan de Vries, a journalist from the Netherlands' RTL TV. “You can’t relate anymore to the Socialist Party because there are so many small kingdoms, kings and queens who are trying to defend their own crown”.

De Vries said it wasn't useful to think of European politics in terms of left and right, noting that “the Greens are very left and the UMP very right." He said that Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the Franco-German co-president of the European Greens–European Free Alliance, and other Green candidates fared well because they represent a “very modern party”, a “party of the 21^st century.”

Click here to watch Part 2 with Alain Lipietz, Olivier Ubeda and Stefan de Vries.