The next European Parliament elections will be held between 6 and 9 June 2024, according to a letter by the Swedish minister of EU affairs, whose country holds the rotating EU Council presidency, to Parliament President Roberta Metsola.
The letter by Jessika Roswall, sent on 12 May and seen by EURACTIV, is a reply to Metsola’s proposal to hold the elections in the 23-26 May period.
The letter explained that, since member states could not come up with a unanimous decision about the election date, the current EU electoral law sets the election days in early June by default.
“As you know, the EU Electoral Act establishes that changing the dates requires a unanimous decision of the Council, after consultation with the European Parliament. Since none of the alternative dates gathered the support required, it is the dates established in the EU Electoral Law that will apply,” Roswall told Metsola in the letter.
Lack of time
The decision may bring about some difficulties, such as for MEPs who will have less time to settle in, form a working majority, and take crucial decisions about the new European Commission make-up.
In the 2019 elections, roughly 60% of the 705 MEPs were new to the Parliament. In the next polls, it is expected that more than half of the EU lawmakers will be in their first mandate.
An old electoral law
MEPs were particularly critical of the EU electoral law, particularly from the European People’s Party (EPP) and the Socialists and Democrats (S&D), respectively, Danuta Maria Hubner and Domenec Ruiz Devesa, both with a track record of work on the subject.
The law has been in place since 1976, and set the terms for the first direct European Parliament elections in 1979. However, it has remained unchanged despite several decades of steady European integration.
Devesa was the rapporteur of the proposal to introduce transnational lists at EU level, to allow EU citizens to elect a small number of MEPs from other countries on an EU-wide list, and to make legally binding the so-called Spitzenkandidat process, the election of a candidate for the Commission presidency representing the European political party which obtains the most seats.
Parliament approved the proposal in May 2022 but member states have yet to hold their own vote on the proposal, and are unlikely to do so before the next elections, meaning that the draft law will be scrapped.
Unhappy Portugal
According to an official source from a political group of the European Parliament, the early June default choice will be particularly problematic in Portugal, since the country will have public holidays that week which risks a low turnout.
However, the Council did not find any other alternatives to that since some member states have similar issues in other periods.
*Luca Bertuzzi contributed reporting
[Edited by Zoran Radosavljevic/Benjamin Fox]
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