European Elections 2024
From 6 to 9 June 2024, around 360 million Europeans were called to the polls to elect the 720 members of the European Parliament for its tenth legislative term.
The EU Electoral Act determines that the European parliamentary elections take place every five years. In 2024, elections were held across the 27 EU member states from Thursday 6 June to Sunday 9 June.
Organisation of the elections
The European elections are organised according to member states’ national legislation, though there are a number of common provisions established by EU law. Proportional representation has to be ensured, and while most of the countries are organised as a single constituency some – Belgium, Ireland, Italy and Poland - divide their territories into multiple constituencies.
Find details on these and other organisational aspects of the elections in this infographic and this briefing.
Lead candidates
In order to “Europeanise” the elections and to boost the democratic legitimacy of EU decision-making, Parliament called ahead of the 2014 European elections on the European political parties to nominate candidates for the Presidency of the European Commission. The aim was to allow citizens to influence directly, through their vote in the European elections, the choice of the head of the European executive. This procedure has become known as the Spitzenkandidaten ('lead candidates' in German) process.
In the 2014 elections, it resulted in the election of Jean-Claude Juncker.
Following the May 2019 European elections, the European Council proposed Ursula von der Leyen as candidate for President of the European Commission to the European Parliament. She was not a lead candidate.
Ahead of the 2024 European elections, Parliament confirmed the importance of applying the lead candidate system (the “Spitzenkandidaten” process), in which European political parties designate their respective candidates for the post of EU Commission President ahead of the elections. For Parliament, a clear and credible link between the choice made by voters and the position of the Commission President is necessary. Based on the EU Treaties, this choice should depend on the candidate that secures majority support in Parliament.
The lead candidates for the 2024 European elections were:
Ursula von der Leyen (Germany) for the European People’s Party (EPP) group,
Nicolas Schmit (Luxembourg), for the Socialists and Democrats (S&D) group,
Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann (Germany), Sandro Gozi (Italy) and Valérie Hayer (France), for Renew Europe group,
Terry Reintke (Germany) and Bas Eickhout (The Netherlands), and Raül Romeva (Spain) and Maylis Roßberg, for the Greens/EFA group, and
Walter Baier (Austria), for The Left - GUE/NGL group.
The Identity and Democracy (ID) and the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) groups did not officially appoint any lead candidate.
A debate among the lead candidates, organised by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), took place on 23 May in the afternoon, in the Parliament’s plenary chamber in Brussels. Find here more information about the debate.
Election results
From Sunday 9 June 2024, the European Parliament published data on the election results as they became publicly available in member states, in 24 EU languages, on https://results.elections.europa.eu.
Technical questions about election results should be addressed to election-results-data@europarl.europa.eu
Results from previous elections
The dynamic and interactive website https://results.elections.europa.eu offers overall European election results, including national breakdowns, the composition of all outgoing European Parliaments since 1984, breakdowns by national parties and political groups since 1979 and all results at the national level since 2009. In addition, the site offers information on trends in European elections, for example on gender balance.
The tool allows you to compare data between different elections. A widget can tailor the website to your needs. It will publish historical results of European elections on your website and provide live results. You may download datasheets in open data formats (json, xml and csv) and graphic image formats (jpg and png).