German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier has warned of the damage to the European Union the success of populists in the European elections could cause.
"We have results in France, in Austria and also in Germany that have given anti-European populists a remarkable increase in votes," Steinmeier told regional public radio station Bayerischer Rundfunk on Tuesday during an official visit to the southern state of Bavaria.
"If two or three large countries in the centre of Europe show attempts at disintegration or disintegration tendencies, then this is not entirely harmless for Europe," said Steinmeier. "These election results in Germany and France are something that must cause concern."
There is also political work to be done in Germany, he said. The election results were different in the east of the country and the west, and it did not help to constantly prophesize the country's demise.
Politicians, he said, must endeavour to properly address the needs of the population. And they simply have to be present, he added.
The coronavirus pandemic was not the only reason why young people were now voting for the far right, said Steinmeier, but it had contributed to the problem.
"These are the long-term consequences of measures, especially for young people who have not yet been able to find their own way of dealing with the situation, with the lockdown, with the closure of schools, but who had no social contacts during that time."
In the elections to the European Parliament earlier in June, far-right or populist parties came first in five EU countries - France, Italy, Austria, Hungary, and Slovakia - while in Germany, Poland and the Netherlands they placed a strong second.
The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) came second in the poll with 15.9%, a strong performance ahead of all three governing parties, although far behind the conservative CDU/CSU bloc on 30%.
In France, the nationalist National Rally topped the poll by a wide margin with 31.37% of the vote.
The far-right Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) just edged past the two traditional centrist Austrian parties to take first place with 25.4% of the vote.
The far right also topped the polls in Italy, with Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni's Brothers of Italy (FdI) garnering 28.76% of the vote.