Member of the European Parliament

A Member of the European Parliament (MEP) is a person who has been elected to serve as a popular representative in the European Parliament.

When the European Parliament was first established, MEPs were directly appointed by the governments of member states from among those already sitting in their own national parliaments. Since 1979, however, MEPs have been elected by direct universal suffrage. Each member state establishes its own method for electing MEPs – and in some states this has changed over time – but the system chosen must be a form of proportional representation. In some member states the MEPs are elected to represent a single national constituency; in others they are elected from sub-national regions.

For a list of current MEPs, see Members of the European Parliament 2014–2019.

From 1 January 2007, when Romania and Bulgaria joined the EU, there were 785 MEPs, but their number was reduced to 736 at the elections in 2009. With effect from the elections held in May 2014 the number has risen again and now stands at 751, with each member state having at least six and at most 96 MEPs.

Elections are held once every five years, on the basis of universal adult suffrage. There is no uniform voting system for the election of MEPs; rather, each member state is free to choose its own system, subject to three restrictions:

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 nation is taken into account, smaller states elect more MEPs than would be strictly justified by their populations alone. As the number of MEPs granted to each member state has arisen from treaty negotiations, there is no precise formula for the apportionment of seats. No change in this configuration can occur without the unanimous consent of all national governments.

The most recent elections to the European Parliament were the European elections of 2014, held in May of that year. They were the largest simultaneous transnational elections ever held anywhere in the world, since nearly 500 million citizens were eligible to vote.

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