European Parliament
The European Parliament is one of the two legislative bodies of the European Union and one of its seven institutions. Together with the Council of the European Union, it adopts European legislation, following a proposal by the European Commission. The Parliament is composed of 720 members, after the June 2024 European elections, from a previous 705 MEPs. It represents the second-largest democratic electorate in the world, with an electorate of around 375 million eligible voters in 2024.
Since 1979, the Parliament has been directly elected every five years by the citizens of the European Union through universal suffrage. Voter turnout in parliamentary elections decreased each time after 1979 until 2019, when voter turnout increased by eight percentage points, and rose above 50% for the first time since 1994. The voting age is 18 in all EU member states except for Malta, Belgium, Austria and Germany, where it is 16, and Greece, where it is 17.
The European Parliament has legislative power in that the adoption of EU legislation normally requires its approval, and that of the Council, in what amounts to a bicameral legislature. However, it does not formally possess the right of initiative in the way that most national parliaments of the member states do, as the right of initiative is a prerogative of the European Commission. Nonetheless, the Parliament and the Council each have the right to request the Commission to initiate the legislative procedure and put forward a proposal.
The Parliament is, in protocol terms, the "first institution" of the European Union, and shares equal legislative and budgetary powers with the Council. It likewise has equal control over the EU budget. Ultimately, the European Commission, which serves as the executive branch of the EU, is accountable to Parliament. In particular, Parliament can decide whether or not to approve the European Council's nominee for President of the Commission, and is further tasked with approving the appointment of the Commission as a whole. It can subsequently force the current Commission to resign by adopting a motion of censure.
The president of the European Parliament is the body's speaker and presides over the multi-party chamber. The five largest political groups are the European People's Party Group, the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats, Patriots for Europe, the European Conservatives and Reformists Group, and Renew Europe. The last EU-wide election was held in 2024.
The Parliament's headquarters are officially in Strasbourg, France, and has its administrative offices in Luxembourg City. Plenary sessions are normally held in Strasbourg for four days a month, but sometimes there are additional sessions in Brussels, while the Parliament's committee meetings are held primarily in Brussels, Belgium. In practice, the Parliament works three weeks per month in Brussels and one week in Strasbourg.
History
The Parliament, like the other EU institutions, was not designed in its current form when it first met on 10 September 1952. One of the oldest common institutions, it began as the Common Assembly of the European Coal and Steel Community. It was a consultative assembly of 78 appointed parliamentarians drawn from the national parliaments of member states, having no legislative powers. The change since its foundation was highlighted by Professor David Farrell of the University of Manchester: "For much of its life, the European Parliament could have been justly labelled a 'multi-lingual talking shop' is now one of the most powerful legislatures in the world"." This was done notably through successive treaty changes and other agreements.Its development since its foundation shows how the European Union's structures have evolved without a clear 'master plan'. Tom Reid of The Washington Post has said of the union that "nobody would have deliberately designed a government as complex and as redundant as the EU". Even the Parliament's three working locations are a result of various disagreements and partial agreements among the governments of the Member States. Although most MEPs would prefer to be based just in Brussels, where it conducts the bulk of its work, at the 1992 Edinburgh summit chaired by John Major, France engineered an agreement whereby the European Parliament's official seat is in Strasbourg, but most of its work is done in Brussels.
Consultative assembly
The body was not mentioned in the original Schuman Declaration. It was assumed or hoped that difficulties with the British would be resolved to allow the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe to perform legislative tasks. A separate Assembly was introduced during negotiations on the Treaty as an institution to counterbalance and monitor the executive while providing democratic legitimacy. The wording of the ECSC Treaty demonstrated leaders' desire for more than a normal consultative assembly by allowing for direct election and using the term "representatives of the people". Its early importance was highlighted when the Assembly was given the task of drawing up the draft treaty to establish a European Political Community. By this document, the Ad Hoc Assembly was established on 13 September 1952 with extra members, but after the failure of the negotiated and proposed European Defence Community, the project was dropped.Instead, the European Economic Community and Euratom were established in 1958 by the Treaties of Rome. The Common Assembly was shared by all three communities and it renamed itself the European Parliamentary Assembly. The first meeting was held on 19 March 1958 having been set up in Luxembourg City, it elected Schuman as its president and on 13 May it rearranged itself to sit according to political ideology rather than nationality. This is seen as the birth of the modern European Parliament, with Parliament's 50 years celebrations being held in March 2008 rather than 2002.
The three communities merged their remaining organs as the European Communities in 1967, and the body's name was changed to the current "European Parliament" in 1962. In 1970 the Parliament was granted power over areas of the Communities' budget, which were expanded to the whole budget in 1975. Under the Rome Treaties, the Parliament should have become elected. However, the Council was required to agree a uniform voting system beforehand, which it failed to do. The Parliament threatened to take the Council to the European Court of Justice; this led to a compromise whereby the Council would agree to elections, but with each Member State using its own electoral system, leaving the issue of a uniform voting systems to be decided at a later date.
For its sessions the assembly, and later the parliament, until 1999 convened in the same premises as the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe: the House of Europe until 1977, and the Palace of Europe until 1999.
Elected Parliament
In 1979, its members were directly elected for the first time. This sets it apart from similar institutions such as those of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe or Pan-African Parliament which are appointed. After that first election, the parliament held its first session on 17 July 1979, electing Simone Veil MEP as its president. Veil was also the first female president of the Parliament since it was formed as the Common Assembly.As an elected body, the Parliament began to draft proposals addressing the functioning of the EU. For example, in 1984, inspired by its previous work on the Political Community, it drafted the "draft Treaty establishing the European Union". Although it was not adopted as such by the Member States, many of its ideas were later taken up in subsequent amending treaties. Furthermore, the Parliament began holding votes on proposed Commission Presidents from the 1980s, before it was given any formal right to veto their appointment.
Since it became an elected body, the membership of the European Parliament has expanded when new nations have joined. Following this, the Treaty of Nice imposed a cap on the number of members to be elected: 732, later raised to 751 by the Treaty of Lisbon.
Like the other institutions, the Parliament's seat was not yet fixed. The provisional arrangements placed Parliament in Strasbourg, while the Commission and Council had their seats in Brussels. In 1985 the Parliament, wishing to be closer to these institutions, built a second chamber in Brussels and moved some of its work there despite protests from some states. A final agreement was eventually reached by the European Council in 1992. It stated the Parliament would retain its formal seat in Strasbourg, where twelve sessions a year would be held, but with all other parliamentary activity in Brussels. This two-seat arrangement was contested by the Parliament, but was later enshrined in the Treaty of Amsterdam. To this day the institution's locations are a source of contention.
The Parliament gained more powers from successive revisions of the EU treaties, notably through the extension of the ordinary legislative procedure, and the right to approve international agreements through the consent procedure.
In 1999, the Parliament forced the resignation of the Santer Commission. The Parliament had refused to approve the Community budget over allegations of fraud and mis-management in the commission. The two main parties took on a government-opposition dynamic for the first time during the crisis which ended in the Commission resigning en masse, the first of any forced resignation, in the face of an impending censure from the Parliament.
Commission accountability to the Parliament
The Parliament had always had the right to dismiss the European Commission in a vote of censure, but it initially had no role in its appointment. In the 1992 Treaty of Maastricht, the Member States gave the Parliament the right to approve or reject an incoming Commission. In the 1997 Treaty of Amsterdam, they gave it the right to approve or reject an incoming Commission President, subsequently describing Parliament's vote as the "election" of the President, and requiring the European Council to make its proposal to Parliament in light of the results of the European elections.In 2004, following the largest trans-national election in history, the European Council proposed as Commission President a candidate, José Manuel Barroso, from the largest political party. The Parliament approved him by 431 votes to 251. However, when it came to the vote on the Commission as a whole, MEPs raised doubts about some of the nominees following their performance in the public hearings of them conducted by Parliament's committees. Most notably, the Civil Liberties committee rejected Rocco Buttiglione for the post of Commissioner for Justice, Freedom and Security over his views on homosexuality. That was the first time the Parliament had ever opposed an incoming Commissioner and, despite Barroso's initial insistence upon Buttiglione, the Parliament forced Buttiglione to be withdrawn. A number of other Commissioners also had to be withdrawn or reassigned before Parliament voted to allow the Barroso Commission to take office.
The Parliament also became more assertive in amending legislative proposals put forward by the European Commission. A notable example was on the Bolkestein directive in 2006, when the Parliament voted by a large majority for over 400 amendments that changed the fundamental principle of the law. The Financial Times described it in the following terms:
In 2007, for the first time, Justice Commissioner Franco Frattini included Parliament in talks on the second Schengen Information System even though, in this field at the time, MEPs only needed to be consulted on parts of the package. After that experiment, Frattini indicated he would like to include Parliament in all justice and criminal matters, informally pre-empting the new powers they were due to gain in 2009 as part of the Treaty of Lisbon.