More members will be elected to the European Parliament this year

The decision to increase the number of mandates was made taking into account demographic changes in the member states. 15 additional seats in the EP were shared by 12 countries. France, Spain and the Netherlands received the most – two additional seats each – in the Parliament.

European Parliament/What the distribution of seats in the EP will look like by country

Eleven MEPs will continue to represent Lithuania. Meanwhile, our neighbors Latvia and Poland will elect one more candidate to the EP this year, 9 and 54 members, respectively. Austria, Denmark, Belgium, Finland, Slovakia, Ireland and Slovenia also received one additional mandate this year. None of the other countries electing their representatives to the EP will lose their seats in the chamber this year.

The number of seats in the EP for each country is determined before each election. According to the current EU legislation, no more than 750 members and the President of the EP can be elected to the EP. The allocation of seats takes into account the population of the Member States, as well as the need to ensure a minimum representation of European citizens from smaller countries.

Although the number of EP seats for each country is calculated according to the population, this distribution model with the possibility of political corrections is slightly more favorable for smaller EU members. For example, in this term of the EP, Lithuania has just 3 seats less than Finland or Slovakia, although these countries are almost twice as big as our country in terms of population.

However, Wouter Wolfs, a senior research fellow at the Institute of Public Administration at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium, said in a post on social network X that France, Belgium and Poland were the biggest winners of this redistribution of EP seats, as they were allocated “non-essential” seats to ensure decreasing proportionality of representation.

After the increase and redistribution of seats, the majority of its representatives in the EP in 2024-2029. during the term, Germany (96), France (81), Italy (76) and Spain (61) will have the least, Cyprus (6), Luxembourg (6) and Malta (6).

It remains to be seen how the overall distribution of EP seats by country will look like in this table.