Also there is question of lessons to be drawn from Indian politics, how it's relevant for you. If European Union is more coherent entity with strong executive wing then its politics may become more similar to what is going on here. India after all in many ways is like Europe (it has the same size and her population is more than twice than EU's), it is big peninsula attached to the largest chunk of earth - Asia.
India has multilayered and very complicated multiparty system where it is necessary to forge mammoth coalitions of 20 plus parties. That's why if EU is more coherent entity it will inevitably resemble India, I suspect that you will be able to see very strange combinations. Also European politicians will be forced to look for friends outside their borders, always keeping in mind that pan-European ambitions cannot be realized without complicated warren of ties across political spectrum.
Second-order elections - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The term has appeared for the first time in Karlheinz Reif and Hermann Schmitt's "Nine second-order national elections -A conceptual framework for the analysis of European election results" article for the European Journal of Political Research, in 1980.