After prodding voters to turn out in their first-ever European elections, governments in the Baltic republics were set Sunday for a shake-up in their grip on national power, polls predicted.

One day after voting closed in Latvia, opposition parties said they were ready to form a new government Sunday, while Estonia's 14-month-old government braced for European losses and Lithuania's ballot for the EU parliament was coloured by a simultaneous presidential election.

With results due to be announced in Latvia late Sunday, an exit poll predicted that rightist opposition parties would sideline the ruling Green and centrist coalition from the country's nine European Parliament seats.

"I am sure, we will start to talk about the necessity of forming a new government," Einars Repse, leader of the centre-right New Era party, who was pushed to resign as prime minister in February, told AFP.

New Era was in second place in a Baltic News Service exit poll with 19.6 percent, behind the right-wing opposition free market-oriented Fatherland and Freedom Party (30.5 percent).

Voting was brisker in Lithuania where an exit poll by Baltic News Service predicted that a leftist party set up by a populist Russian-born millionaire parliamentarian last year would top the European ballot with 23 percent.

The telephone exit poll of 1,000 people who had voted in the largest Baltic Reopublic Sunday left the ruling Social Democrats trailing with 12.7 percent.

The parliamentarian and businessman, Viktor Uspakich, commands broad support beyond the country's Russian speaking minority, an AFP correspondent said.

His blunt-speaking pledge to defend Lithuanian interests in the European Parliament appealed to poorer sections of the population.

Officials and voters admitted the likely explanation for the largest Baltic republic bucking the general trend towards apathy was the simultaneous presidential race.

"European issues are much more complicated and they (voters) think first about local issues," Lithuania's election chief Zenonas Vaigauskas said.

Vaigauskas forecast that the turnout would reach 40-50 percent of all eligible voters.

Julius Labanauskas, a 52-year-old Vilnius bus driver, told AFP he focussed on the "real power" that would be granted to one of the five national presidential candidates.

"I have heard there will be some 800 parliamentarians in Brussels, so what could our 13 do there?" he added.

In Estonia, where pre-election polls indicated a hard time for Prime Minister Juhan Parts, only 26.7 percent of voters -- 233,450 people -- ventured out on Sunday.

That was less than half of those who voted in last year's national elections, Estonia's central election committee said.

"There is no wonder about it, Europe is showing us the way even in low voting activity," Tallinn polling station chief Jaan Kollist told AFP.

Thirty-two year-old chemist Signe Leito told AFP: "I went to vote just to raise the percentage. It shows Estonia in bad light to Europe if we have such a low participation in elections."

But there were signs that the electoral diehards were more intent on handing most of the country's six European seats to the leftist opposition.

A pre-election opinion poll indicated that Parts' rightist Res Publica party was only third in Estonians' pecking order with a forecast one seat in the European parliament.

The pro-EU Social Democrats, normally a minor political force, were set to gain two seats just ahead of the liberal Reformist Party with one seat and the left-leaning coalition partner, the People's Union, alos with one seat, the poll added.

On Friday, Parts, President Arnold Ruutel and Estonia's top parliamentary official urged their 874,472 voters to cast their ballots, warning that "Estonia's vitality also depends on Europe's future".