The European Parliament is only one piece of how the EU actually runs. This page zooms out: the other institutions that share power with it, how each one is staffed, and how a proposal moves from an idea to a law — or gets struck down in court.
The basics, in plain terms. The EU has no single "government" the way a country does — power is deliberately split across several institutions so no one body can act alone. Roughly: the Commission proposes laws and runs the day-to-day administration, the Parliament and the Council of the EU jointly debate, amend, and adopt them, the European Council sets the big-picture political priorities without legislating itself, the Court of Justice settles legal disputes, the European Central Bank runs monetary policy independently for the countries that use the euro, and the Court of Auditors checks that EU money was spent as intended. Every EU country gets a seat at each of these tables.
This is the "ordinary legislative procedure" — the path used for most EU laws. Four of the seven institutions do most of the work here; the other three (below) operate alongside this loop rather than inside it.
Drafts and proposes new legislation. For most policy areas, it's the only institution allowed to put a text on the table.
Debate, amend, and must both agree on an identical final text — Parliament representing citizens, the Council representing national governments — before it can become law.
Enforces the adopted law across all 27 member states and can take a government to court if it fails to apply it.
Rules on disputes over what the law means, and can strike down EU acts or fine states that break it.
Three institutions sit outside this loop:
The EU's 27 heads of state and government meet to set the political direction and priorities that shape what the Commission later proposes — but it has no power to pass laws itself.
Fully independent by design — sets interest rates and monetary policy for the eurozone without taking instructions from any other EU institution or government.
Audits how the EU budget was actually spent after the fact and publishes an annual report — it has no power to block or punish, only to publicize.
Each is staffed differently — some by direct election, some by national appointment, some deliberately insulated from politics altogether.
There's no official ranking — the treaties deliberately avoid naming a single most-powerful institution, and each has a different kind of power rather than more or less of the same kind. But in practice, people tend to point to three different answers depending on what "in charge" means. Politically, the European Council carries the most weight day to day: it's made up of the actual heads of state and government, so when it agrees on a priority, the rest of the EU machine tends to fall in line, even though it can't write a single line of binding law itself. Institutionally, the Commission holds a unique lever — almost nothing becomes EU law without it proposing the text first, and it alone enforces that law once passed. Legally, the Court of Justice has the last word: its rulings bind every other institution and every member state, including national governments, and EU law has been held to override conflicting national law since a landmark 1964 ruling. The Parliament and the Council of the EU, meanwhile, are formally equal to each other as co-legislators — neither can pass a law over the other's objection — which is why so much of the real negotiating happens between them rather than in public.
A quick reference for how each institution is staffed and who currently leads it.