Scandal-plagued Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's centre-right party won European Parliament elections but fell well short of the 40 percent score he predicted, a television projection showed Monday. The People of Freedom (PDL) party won 35.6 percent of the two-day vote, followed by the Democratic Party (PD) with 26.3 percent, according to a projection by the Digis Institute for Sky TG24 television. 'It's a disappointing result,' said Mario Tarchi, a political scientist at the University of Florence. 'You could talk about a 'scandal effect'. But the right won because the left has not progressed,' he told selfnews. Turnout for the vote was the highest for the 27-nation European Union at 65 percent, though well down from the 73 percent recorded in the last EU elections in 2004. Berlusconi, the only leader of a large EU member state to stand as head of an EU electoral list, has shown little sign of caving in to growing pressure to explain his ties to an 18-year-old aspiring model. 'The electoral results will represent a terrible defeat for this left, which has substituted calumny for an electoral programme which it doesn't have,' Berlusconi, 72, said last week, predicting that the PDL would garner 40 percent of the vote. Berlusconi has been at the centre of a media storm pressuring him to explain his relationship with Noemi Letizia, a scandal that sparked a public row between him and second wife Veronica Lario, who has filed for divorce. The Italian leader has maintained that he met Letizia through her parents whom he has known for many years, while her ex-boyfriend claims Berlusconi contacted her out of the blue, and directly, only last year. This week the scandal deepened with the publication by Spanish daily El Pais of photos of topless women at Berlusconi's villa in Sardinia. Hard on the heels of the Letizia scandal, a Milan court late last month released its full reasoning for convicting Berlusconi's British tax lawyer David Mills of accepting a 600,000-dollar (440,000-euro) bribe from him in exchange for false testimony. Also Sunday, the anti-immigration Northern League, allied with the PDL, scored 9.6 percent, compared with 8.3 percent in last year's general elections that handed Berlusconi his third mandate as premier. The PDL had scored two percentage points more last year. The result continued the decline of the centre-left PD, which scored 33 percent in last year's general elections. The small opposition Italy of Values party, whose leader Antonio Di Pietro slammed the Berlusconi government as 'anti-democratic, fascist, racist and xenophobic,' nearly doubled its score, from 4.4 percent last year to 7.8 percent in the EU vote. 