"We have to be honest that the crisis and the rise in unemployment is an occasion for populist forces to become more aggressive and gain some votes", Barroso, a former centre-right prime minister in Portugal, told Reuters in an interview. "What we don't like is the discourse that is sometimes behind anti-European slogans, a discourse that is promoting what I call negative values, things like narrow nationalism, protectionism and xenophobia. That is a concern. We should not forget that in Europe, not so many decades ago, we had very, very worrying developments of xenophobia and racism and intolerance. So I think everybody that has European principles should be worried about some of these movements."
Mainstream politicians and political analysts say it is too early to predict with any precision how many seats the anti-EU and protest parties will pick up, but broad estimates suggest it could be anywhere from 20 to 30 per cent of the vote.
At the same time, Barroso said he was confident the mainstream political parties would remain largely dominant in the new parliament, and urged them to speak out for European values if they were to keep extremists in check. "The pro-European forces...need to take the lead, not give the initiative to extremist forces, and explain in a rational and reasonable way what Europe brings", he said. "That is why we are asking the so-called mainstream parties to have the courage to get out of their comfort zone, to think that today, at a time of crisis, we cannot take the European Union for granted."
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