Brussels  - Fix the economy and stop global warming: those are the key messages from European Union voters to the European Parliament after the weekend's EU-wide elections.

The polls gave conservative forces an emphatic win over their socialist rivals, but handed an unexpectedly strong mandate to environmentalist parties in what analysts see as a reflection of voters' key concerns - and the parliament's future battlegrounds.

"The financial crisis is priority number one: this is where the huge debates will be. Priority number two is clearly climate change," said Piotr Kaczynski, expert on EU internal politics at the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) in Brussels, told the German Press Agency dpa.

The vote, which ran from Thursday to Sunday, took place against the backdrop of Europe's worst economic downturn since World War II. Analysts say that fears for their future prosperity were the main reason that EU voters threw their weight behind conservative parties.

"In a crisis, people clearly think that the priority is to get out of the crisis, not to raise social standards," said Hugo Brady, research fellow at the Centre for European Reform, a think-tank in London.

The vote gave centre-right and pro-EU parties the largest share of seats in parliament, but left them well short of an absolute majority, with 263 members (MEPs) out of the total of 736 elected for the five-year legislature.

That makes "likely" the re-election of the European Commission's centre-right president, Jose Manuel Barroso, Brady said.

But it sets up for a clash between the conservatives and the two parties they have targeted as future partners, the socialists and liberals, as they bid to reform Europe's financial markets - the hottest issue on the agenda.

The socialists "are bringing, and have brought, quite a few initiatives on this, so they will be able to make their mark," Sara Hagemann, a researcher at the Brussels-based European Policy Centre, told dpa.

It also sets up for an internal fight between Poland's more free-market conservatives and their pro-regulation French colleagues.

And it promises a bitter spat with Britain's conservatives, who have vowed to pull out of the main European Parliament centre-right group, and who will fight tooth and nail against anything which seems to threaten London's role as Europe's premier financial hub.

"The centre-right groups don't have a uniform position on the issue of liberal or regulated markets, so there will be differences," Hagemann said.

The new-look parliament also looks set for a bruising fight over climate change. Insiders say that the commission should propose tough new laws on cutting greenhouse-gas emissions from transport when it takes up its next mandate in the autumn - something the EU's conservatives have long opposed.

That will pit them against not just the socialists, but also the Greens, the only party to fare better with voters this year than at the last poll in 2004, increasing their take from 43 to 51 seats.

The parliament will be "very active on climate change," with the major parties vying with the Greens to prove their climate-friendly credentials, Hagemann said.

The battle will be all the more heated because Europe's industrial sector is already the focus of intense scrutiny in the light of the financial crisis and the resultant massive state bail-outs - rescues which would have been unthinkable five years ago.

"The financial crisis is meddling a lot with industrial policy: the rules are being re-written," Kaczynski said.

But beyond those issues, analysts agree that one of the parliament's main concerns over the next five years will be making itself more popular with voters, after turnout at the polls fell to a record low of 42.85 per cent.

"For the parliament, the magic number is 40 per cent. If it falls below that, they need to take a major look at what they do next," Brady said.(dpa)