Before the vote tallies mean anything, it helps to know who's voting. This page maps the European Parliament's political groups, where they sit on the political spectrum, and the committees where most of the real legislative work happens — plus a growing, hand-verified directory of individual MEPs.
The basics, in plain terms. The European Parliament is the only EU institution whose members — MEPs, or Members of the European Parliament — are directly elected by voters, one election every five years, in all 27 member states at once. There are 720 seats total, split between countries roughly by population (small countries get proportionally more seats than their population alone would suggest, so they aren't drowned out by the big ones). Once elected, MEPs don't sit by country — they sit by political group: European-level alliances of national parties that share a broad ideology, so a French, a German, and a Polish party with similar politics will usually sit together. Groups matter because Parliament's day-to-day power — committee seats, speaking time, who gets to steer a piece of legislation — is allocated between groups, not between countries.
President of the European Parliament: Roberta Metsola (EPP, Malta), re-elected in July 2024. The President chairs plenary sessions, represents Parliament externally, and — together with 14 Vice-Presidents — forms the Bureau that runs the institution's day-to-day organization. Like committee chairs further down this page, the presidency itself is the product of a negotiated deal between the main political groups, not a vote purely on merit.
"Hemicycle" is just the name for the half-circle chamber where MEPs sit during plenary sessions — the same word is used for the French and German parliaments. Seating isn't random or by country: like most European parliaments, MEPs are arranged left to right by ideology, from the most left-wing group to the most right-wing one, so you can roughly read a group's politics off where it sits. Below is the current chamber: 720 seats, nine political groups (plus one currently vacant), plus the reserved benches where the Council and Commission sit when they attend.
Every country's delegation, cross-tabulated by political group. Seats are allocated to member states on a "degressively proportional" basis — smaller countries get more seats per capita than larger ones — and each delegation then splits across groups largely along that country's own national election results.
Plenary — the full 720-member sitting, the one that gets photographed — is really just where Parliament rubber-stamps or rejects a text. The actual work of reading a proposal line by line, negotiating amendments, and hearing from experts and lobbyists happens earlier, in a much smaller committee of a few dozen MEPs who specialize in one policy area (trade, agriculture, justice, and so on). One MEP on the committee is put in charge of steering the file — and depending on the type of file, they write one of two different documents. For an ordinary legislative proposal (a new EU law), that's a report. For a "consent procedure" file — most often Parliament approving something it can't amend, like ratifying an international treaty or trade agreement — it's instead called a recommendation. Either way, that document is what the whole committee, and eventually all of Parliament, votes on. By the time a text reaches plenary, most of the real negotiating is already done. In total there are 26 bodies: 22 standing committees, two subcommittees that report into a "parent" committee (Human Rights, under Foreign Affairs; and Tax Matters, under Economic and Monetary Affairs), and two special committees with a renewable 12-month mandate — European Democracy Shield and Housing — set up in December 2024 to tackle issues that didn't fit neatly under an existing committee. Security and Defence and Public Health were themselves subcommittees until that same December 2024 vote upgraded both to fully-fledged standing committees.
Every committee (and subcommittee) has a chair who sets its meeting agenda and running order — a real lever of influence, since a chair can speed up a file they like or slow-walk one they don't. Holding a seat on a committee is not the same as holding that chair: all 26 chairs are carved up in a separate, closed-door deal between the main political groups after every election (or, for the two special committees, when they're set up), roughly in proportion to each group's size.
Search by name, country, or political group.