Elections to the European Parliament

Elections to the European Parliament take place every five years by universal adult suffrage. 751 MEPs are elected to the European Parliament, which has been directly elected since 1979. No other EU institution is directly elected, with the Council of the European Union and the European Council being only indirectly legitimated through national elections. While Europarties have the right to campaign EU-wide for the European elections, campaigns still take place through national election campaigns, advertising national delegates from national parties.

The allocation of seats to each member state is based on the principle of degressive proportionality, so that, while the size of the population of each country is taken into account, smaller states elect more MEPs than is proportional to their populations. As the numbers of MEPs to be elected by each country have arisen from treaty negotiations, there is no precise formula for the apportionment of seats among member states. No change in this configuration can occur without the unanimous consent of all governments.

Italicised countries are divided into sub-national constituencies.
^a Includes Gibraltar, but not any other BOT (including the SBAs), nor the Crown dependencies
^b The speaker is not counted officially, thus leaving 750 MEPs.
^c As proposed by European Parliament on 13 March 2013

There is no uniform voting system for the election of MEPs; rather, each member state is free to choose its own system, subject to certain restrictions:

Most of the member states of the European Union elect their MEPs with a single constituency covering the entire state, using party-list proportional representation. There is however a great variety of electoral procedures: some countries use the highest averages method of proportional representation, some use the largest remainder method, some open lists and others closed. In addition, the method of calculating the quota and the election threshold vary from country to country. Countries with multiple constituencies are:

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