European Parliament: how it works, seats and members

The European Parliament: the EU’s only directly elected institution

The European Parliament is the European Union’s law-making assembly and the only EU institution whose members are chosen directly by voters. Since the European Union’s most recent continent-wide vote, held from 6 to 9 June 2024 across the 27 member states, it has counted 720 MEPs, up from 705 in the 2019-2024 term. The 15 extra seats came from a European Council decision taken in June 2023, distributed among 12 countries whose population had grown relative to the rest, and the total still sits below the 751-seat ceiling set by the Lisbon Treaty. Newly elected MEPs took their seats at the Parliament’s constitutive session in Strasbourg on 16 July 2024.

Unlike most national parliaments, this one operates across three cities by treaty, not by choice. Strasbourg, in eastern France, is the Parliament’s official seat and hosts 12 ordinary plenary sessions a year, each running four days, under the terms of the 1992 Edinburgh Protocol, later written into the Amsterdam Treaty. Committee work, party-group meetings and additional short plenary sessions happen in Brussels, where most MEPs and their staff spend the bulk of their working weeks. The Parliament’s administrative General Secretariat, several thousand permanent staff who prepare legislative files and run translation and logistics, is based in Luxembourg. The arrangement is expensive and often criticised, most vocally by MEPs who back a single Brussels seat, but changing it would require unanimous agreement among all member states to amend the treaties, so it has not moved since the 1990s.

Seats are shared out among countries by degressive proportionality, a rule fixed by treaty under which no country can hold fewer than 6 seats or more than 96, and larger countries get proportionally fewer MEPs per resident than smaller ones. Germany holds the maximum 96 seats for 2024-2029, France 81 and Italy 76, while Cyprus, Luxembourg and Malta each hold the treaty minimum of 6. Once elected, MEPs sit by political family rather than nationality. Eight groups formed after the 2024 election: the centre-right European People’s Party is the largest with 188 seats, ahead of the centre-left Socialists and Democrats on 136. Patriots for Europe, a new hard-right group launched in July 2024 around Viktor Orban’s Fidesz and Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National, became the third-largest force with 84 seats, just ahead of the European Conservatives and Reformists on 78 and the liberal Renew Europe on 77. The Greens/EFA (53 seats), The Left (46) and the smaller, further-right Europe of Sovereign Nations (25) round out the groups, alongside 33 MEPs who sit unaffiliated with any of them; these balances have shifted somewhat as individual MEPs changed groups since 2024.

The Parliament’s powers rest on co-legislation: under the ordinary legislative procedure, almost no EU law, from product safety rules to climate targets, takes effect without both the Parliament and the Council of the EU agreeing on an identical text. It shares budgetary authority the same way, approving the EU’s multiannual financial framework and each annual budget jointly with the Council. It also elects the President of the European Commission, having reconfirmed Ursula von der Leyen on 18 July 2024 with 401 votes in favour, and questions each incoming commissioner in public hearings before approving the full College. As a last resort, a two-thirds majority of votes cast can pass a motion of censure and force the whole Commission to resign at once; no such motion has ever succeeded, though the Santer Commission resigned in March 1999 rather than face one. Maltese MEP Roberta Metsola, of the EPP, has chaired the chamber as its President since July 2024, having first taken the post in January 2022.

The Parliament is easy to confuse with two other bodies that share the word “Council.” The European Council brings together the 27 national leaders and its own president, Antonio Costa since December 2024, to set the EU’s political priorities a few times a year; it never legislates. The Council of the EU is a separate body of national ministers who co-legislate with Parliament, one minister per country per policy area, under a presidency that rotates every six months, a different kind of intergovernmental structure again from the defence alliance covered on the NATO page. A third body causes even more confusion: the Council of Europe, also headquartered in Strasbourg and founded in 1949, has 46 member states, including non-EU countries such as the United Kingdom and Turkey, runs the European Court of Human Rights, and has no institutional link to the EU or its Parliament at all.

Political group	Political family	Seats (July 2024)
European People’s Party (EPP)	Centre-right, Christian democrat	188
Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats (S&D)	Centre-left, social democrat	136
Patriots for Europe (PfE)	National-conservative, right-wing populist	84
European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR)	National-conservative	78
Renew Europe	Liberal, centrist	77
Greens/European Free Alliance (Greens/EFA)	Green, regionalist	53
The Left in the European Parliament (GUE/NGL)	Left-wing, socialist	46
Europe of Sovereign Nations (ESN)	Hard-right, national sovereigntist	25
Non-attached (NI)	No group	33

Country	MEPs (2024-2029)
Austria	20
Belgium	22
Bulgaria	17
Croatia	12
Cyprus	6
Czechia	21
Denmark	15
Estonia	7
Finland	15
France	81
Germany	96
Greece	21
Hungary	21
Ireland	14
Italy	76
Latvia	9
Lithuania	11
Luxembourg	6
Malta	6
Netherlands	31
Poland	53
Portugal	21
Romania	33
Slovakia	15
Slovenia	9
Spain	61
Sweden	21