27 Systems, One Result: The Complexity of European Elections

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Paris: Europe Prepares for Major Democratic Exercise as 350 Million Voters Head to the Polls

More than 350 million people across 27 countries are set to participate in one of the West’s largest democratic events from June 6 to 9. During this period, EU residents will elect 720 members of the European Parliament.

Key Points About the Vote

Keeping Things in Proportion

All countries must use proportional representation, ensuring that a party’s share of the vote is reflected in its seat tally. However, each member state employs its own variant of this system. Here are the three main types of electoral systems, ranked from least to most complicated:

Closed-List Voting

Six countries, including Germany, France, and Spain, use this system. In closed-list voting, voters can only vote for a party list and cannot change the order of the party’s candidates on the list.

Preferential Voting

In this system, voters can express their preference for one or more candidates. Depending on the country, they may either change the position of candidates on a single list or pick candidates from different lists.

Candidates who receive the most preference votes win seats. This method is favored by 19 countries, including Italy, Poland, the Netherlands, and the Nordic countries.

Single Transferable Vote

Voters rank candidates in order of preference. Candidates are elected once they reach a certain threshold of votes.

Any surplus votes are then passed down to the voter’s next-preferred candidate, continuing through successive rounds of counting until the least-preferred candidate is reached. Malta and Ireland both use this system.

As Europe gears up for this significant electoral event, understanding the various voting systems highlights the diverse democratic processes within the EU.

Voting: A Right or a Duty?

In the European Union, the approach to voting in elections varies significantly across member states. Notably, four countries—Belgium, Greece, Bulgaria, and Luxembourg—have made voting in EU elections mandatory, although enforcement is often lax.

In the remaining countries, citizens have the freedom to choose whether to cast their ballots.

Lowering the Voting Age

While most EU countries require voters to be 18, recent changes in Germany and Belgium have aligned them with Austria, Greece, and Malta, where the voting age has been lowered to 16.

However, eligibility to stand in the European elections remains more restrictive. In most countries, candidates must be at least 18, but Poland and the Czech Republic require candidates to be 21, Romania requires 23, and Italy and Greece set the minimum age at 25.

Postal Voting In, E-Voting Out

Postal voting is an option in thirteen EU states, including Germany, Spain, and the Nordic countries, primarily for citizens living abroad. This year, Greece’s diaspora will utilize postal voting for the first time, a practice that gained traction during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Conversely, e-voting remains largely absent, with Estonia standing as the sole country to offer electronic voting to its citizens.

Gender Quotas

Gender representation in EU elections is subject to quotas in ten countries, including France, Italy, Belgium, and Luxembourg. In Spain, Portugal, Greece, Slovenia, and Croatia, party lists must include at least 40 percent of candidates from each gender, compared to 35 percent in Poland.

Romania’s attempt to legislate gender equality in elections fell short due to ambiguous language, resulting in only 15 percent female representation among its current MEPs—the lowest in the European Parliament.

In contrast, Luxembourg leads with 67 percent female MEPs, followed by Finland (57 percent) and Sweden (52 percent), both of which achieve high female representation without quotas. Overall, women constitute 39.8 percent of the European Parliament.