+/– change from the outgoing parliament in 2024. The total number of seats in the parliament has increased by 15.
The European Union parliament has 720 seats in total, all of which are up for election. 361 seats are needed for a majority, with no single political group likely to pass this. Each country has a certain number of members of the European parliament (MEPs), allocated broadly based on population. People vote for national parties that then form largely Europe-wide blocs in the parliament.
The political groups in the parliament are outlined below the map, starting with the most leftwing group. Before the election, polls predicted that Eurosceptic and anti-establishment parties in the ECR and ID groups were set to make significant gains.
Left
The Left group
This group is more leftwing than the SD and includes some green, communist and eurospectic parties.
S&D
Group of the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats
This is the traditional centre-left bloc and comprises mainly social-democratic parties.
Grn/EFA
Group of the Greens/European Free Alliance
This group is largely comprised of green and regionalist parties.
Renew
Renew Europe group
This liberal, pro-European group was founded in 2019 and is the successor of the ALDE group.
EPP
Group of the European People’s party
This is the traditional centre-right bloc and comprises Christian-democratic and conservative parties.
ECR
European Conservatives and Reformists group
These are rightwing parties who are often more critical of the EU than the EPP.
ID
Identity and Democracy group
This far-right group advocates nationalist, populist and eurosceptic policies.
NI
Non-aligned
These are national parties or individual MEPs who decline to align with any of the parliamentary groups.
How the election works
This is the 10th election for the EU parliament, in which all 720 seats will be contested and 361 seats are needed for a majority. No single political group is likely to achieve this target.
Each country is allocated a number of MEPs based on the principle of degressive proportionality, meaning MEPs from larger countries represent more people than MEPs from smaller countries. The minimum number of MEPs from any country is six, while the maximum number is 96.
The number of seats in the EU parliament has increased compared to the outgoing parliament, meaning that some of the seat change numbers need to be treated with care. France, Spain and the Netherlands each have two more seats. Poland, Belgium, Austria, Denmark, Finland, Slovakia, Ireland, Slovenia and Latvia each have one more seat.
Within each country, the number of MEPs elected from each political party is proportional to the number of votes it received.
While seats are allocated by parties within each nation, most MEPs then join a series of transnational political groups – there are now seven, from the rightwing ID group to the Left group – based on shared ideals. Each group requires a minimum of 23 MEPs from at least a quarter of EU countries.
About these results
Source: European parliament. Change figures are based on the outgoing parliament as of Friday 7 June 2024. Countries are grouped in regions according to the United Nations geoscheme.
Results will be tagged with one of three notes, to indicate how final the seat projections are for each country:
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Estimate, when when voting is finished and there is an estimate of a country’s results based on polling institutes;
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Projection, for when there is an estimate of the full EU parliament composition;
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Provisional, for when a country’s official election authority has published its first voting results but the final result is not known, and when the full EU parliament’s composition depends on such provisional national figures;
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Final, for when a country’s official election authority has published full results;
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Constitutive, for when the full EU parliament’s composition is officially confirmed.
Although the seat allocations per party per country will be final once the count is concluded in each member state, the seats per parliamentary grouping at country and EU levels will be provisional until all parties have decided which, if any, parliamentary grouping they will join, which may take days or weeks.