Written by Clare Ferguson with Sara van Tooren; Graphic by Giulio Sabbati.
Between 6 and 9 June 2024, EU citizens will vote for the people they want to represent them in the European Parliament for the next five years. This will be the tenth time EU citizens can vote, since the first direct elections in 1979. Parliament has worked hard to demonstrate it has a meaningful influence on policies that affect citizens’ daily lives, and hopes to combat low voter turnout by simplifying electoral procedure across the member countries so that the elections are genuinely European.
Just as the day on which voters go to the polls varies across EU member countries, with the graphic above showing the different dates on voting takes place between 6 and 9 June, there are differences between the rules that apply to the elections in each country. The European Parliament has sought – since the first elections in 1979 – to set common rules for the European elections. Instead, at EU level only basic principles are set out, with each country filling in the details, usually based on its practices for national elections. One relatively minor set of changes, agreed in 2018, has yet to come into force since one Member State has not ratified them. Parliament has also made much more extensive proposals for reforms, but as yet there is no agreement among EU Member States on those.
European citizenship
From the beginning, Parliament has emphasised that its connection with citizens is crucial for EU democracy, being the main, if not the only European institution directly representing European voters and their wishes, expressed at the polls. Low voter numbers for the first elections in 1979 highlighted this need for a close relationship between citizens and decision makers. Since then, the 1992 Maastricht Treaty formally introduced the concept of European citizens, endowing EU nationals with all the electoral rights that citizenship implies.
European political groups
Besides ensuring every European citizen can vote, equity between the elected candidates is also important. Since 1953, Members of Parliament are divided into groups based on ideology rather than nationality – a unique arrangement among international institutions. The political groups combine the elected representatives of the citizens of the different EU countries who share similar worldviews and political goals. The groups seek to bring together different national delegations, with a view to maximising their influence in the European Parliament and in EU decision making.
Gender balance
The European Parliament is one of the world’s most gender-balanced representative assemblies today, but there are still significant divergences between EU countries, and relatively few women have chaired large European political groups to date. A number of EU countries have introduced rules to make the elections more balanced and inclusive. The European Parliament has drafted a legislative proposal to support, among other things, a binding objective of gender balance for the European elections, although the Council has not yet endorsed it. For now, each Member State decides itself whether to apply electoral quotas.
To boost equal participation, 11 Member States (Belgium, Greece, Spain, France, Croatia, Italy, Luxembourg, Poland, Portugal, Romania and Slovenia) have binding gender quotas for the European elections. The exact quotas also differ for each of these countries. Belgium, France, Italy and Luxembourg apply the parity principle (50 % for each gender). Greece, Spain, Croatia, Portugal and Slovenia have a 40 % gender quota for European elections, and in Poland the minimal presence of each gender is set at 35 %. Romania requires parties ensure ‘balanced’ representation of both sexes on lists of candidates, but does not specifically define proportions.
Electoral participation of people with disabilities
The EU insists that people with disabilities are able to participate fully in society. Through its Charter of Fundamental Rights, the EU guarantees all citizens, regardless of the Member State in which they reside, have the right to vote and stand as a candidate in elections to the European Parliament, and the right to vote and stand as a candidate in municipal elections. With the 2024 European elections approaching, the European Parliament is renewing its commitment to ensuring people with disabilities are able to participate without restriction in this major European political event.
Only six EU Member States (Austria, Croatia, Italy, Latvia, the Netherlands and Sweden) explicitly guarantee equal voting rights for all, regardless of ‘legal capacity’. Conversely, 14 Member States link the right to political participation to individuals’ legal capacity, often through automatic or quasi-automatic exclusion of people under partial or full guardianship regimes. As a result, 400 000 people with disabilities were denied the right to vote in the 2019 European elections, in a failure to comply with the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
Voting from abroad
One issue highlighted by the low voter turnout in 1979 was that EU citizens residing in another country were unable to vote. Members of the European Parliament therefore want to ensure that all European citizens, including those who live in a different EU country to that of their nationality, are able to participate in the European elections. However, little progress has been made since 1984. With more and more people residing temporarily or permanently in a country other than their country of origin today, the debate around this topic has become ever more salient. In 2019, around 17 million EU citizens were estimated to live in an EU Member State of which they were not nationals, 14 million of whom were of voting age. National rules still determine voting rights for EU citizens who have taken advantage of their right to live and work anywhere in the EU. These differ greatly across EU countries, with some still prohibiting such mobile citizens from voting entirely.
Citizens of 23 EU countries can vote from abroad in European elections. The four EU Member States whose citizens cannot are Czechia, Ireland, Malta and Slovakia.
Voting from prison
Another group of people for whom specific voting rules apply, are prisoners. The Council of Europe recognised that the deprivation of liberty is a punishment in itself in 1987, setting out that prison conditions should not aggravate prisoners’ inherent suffering. In 1996, the United Nations Human Rights Committee asserted that limitations to the right to vote should be objective and reasonable. In particular when ‘conviction for an offence is a basis for suspending the right to vote, the period of such suspension should be proportionate to the offence and the sentence’. In 2002, the Venice Commission adopted a code that defines some cumulative conditions under which the right to vote may be removed, including the legal basis, proportionality and type of conviction.
While a significant number of EU countries place no restrictions at all on prisoners voting, many Member States continue to deprive inmates of the right to vote, depending on the type of offence committed and/or the length of their sentence. In those cases where inmates do have the right to vote, they may vote by post, proxy, or at special polling stations. Eleven EU Member States have no restrictions on prisoners voting (Croatia, Cyprus, Czechia, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovenia, Slovakia and Sweden). Fourteen EU countries apply some restrictions linked to the length of the sentence and/or the kind of offence (Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania and Spain). Bulgaria and Estonia do not allow prisoners to vote at all.
- 2024 European elections: National rules
- European elections 2024: Rules of a pan-European democratic event
- The European Parliament and the European citizen as voter
- Seventy years of transnational political groups in the European Parliament: Origins and trajectories
- Towards gender balance in the European elections: Electoral quotas – What can they achieve?
- People with disabilities and the European elections
- Voting from abroad in European Parliament elections
- Prisoners’ voting rights in European Parliament elections
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