Member of The European Parliament - Election of MEPs

Election of MEPs

From 1 January 2007 (when Romania and Bulgaria joined the EU), there were 785 MEPs, but their number fell back to 736 at the latest elections in 2009, though this will eventually rise to 751, with each member state having at least six and at most 96. Elections occur 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 system must be a form of proportional representation, under either the party list or Single Transferable Vote system.
• The electoral area may be subdivided if this will not generally affect the proportional nature of the voting system.
• Any election threshold on the national level must exceed five percent.

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 2009, held in June 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.