European Parliament

• 1. Introduction

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  The European Parliament represents roughly 375 million eligible voters, making it the second-largest democratic electorate on earth, behind only India. Yet for most of its early life, a professor at the University of Manchester described it as a "multi-lingual talking shop" with no real power. What changed? How did an appointed consultative body of 78 parliamentarians, meeting for the first time on the 10th of September 1952, eventually become one of the most powerful legislatures in the world? The answers lie in a story of slow treaty-by-treaty accumulation, forced resignations, corruption scandals, and a running argument over whether the institution should even meet in the city that hosts it.

• 2. From Coal to Parliament

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  When the body first convened on the 19th of March 1958, it gathered in Luxembourg City as the European Parliamentary Assembly, drawing together the three communities that had grown from postwar cooperation: the European Coal and Steel Community, the European Economic Community, and Euratom. Its first act was to elect Robert Schuman as president. A month later, on the 13th of May 1958, it rearranged its seating so that members sat by political ideology rather than nationality. That decision is now considered the birth of the modern Parliament, which is why the institution's 50th anniversary celebrations were held in March 2008, counting from 1958 rather than from the original 1952 founding. The body's name was officially changed to the "European Parliament" in 1962, five years before the three communities formally merged their remaining organs into the European Communities. Budget powers arrived in stages: Parliament was granted authority over parts of the Communities' budget in 1970, and the scope was expanded to cover the whole budget in 1975.

• 3. The First Direct Election

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  In 1979, for the first time, citizens across the European Communities voted directly for their parliamentary representatives. Before that date, MEPs had been appointed by national parliaments, a practice that set the institution apart from any claim to direct democratic legitimacy. The path to direct election had been slow: the Rome Treaties envisaged it, but the Council was required to agree on a uniform voting system first, which it could not do. Parliament threatened to take the Council to the European Court of Justice. The compromise that followed allowed elections to proceed, with each member state using its own electoral system and the question of uniformity deferred indefinitely. On the 17th of July 1979, the newly elected Parliament held its first session and chose Simone Veil as its president, the first woman to hold that office since the Assembly was formed. Turnout at those elections set a high-water mark that would not be surpassed for decades: it declined at every subsequent election until 2019, when it rose by eight percentage points to reach 50.6 percent, the highest since 1994.

• 4. Forcing a Commission Out

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  In 1999, the Parliament deployed the most dramatic tool in its arsenal when it forced the resignation of the Santer Commission. The crisis began with allegations of fraud and mismanagement, directed initially at two socialist members of the Commission, Edith Cresson and Manuel Marín. When Parliament considered refusing to discharge the Community budget, Commission President Jacques Santer declared that a no-vote would amount to a vote of no confidence. Socialist Group leader Pauline Green attempted a vote of confidence; the European People's Party put forward counter-motions. For the first time, the two main groups adopted a government-versus-opposition dynamic rather than their usual grand coalition. The Commission resigned en masse before a formal censure vote was taken, the first such forced resignation in the institution's history. The same budget-discharge power had been exercised twice before, with Parliament refusing to discharge the budget in 1984 and again in 1998; the second refusal is what triggered the events leading to Santer's departure.

• 5. Growing Power Over the Commission

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  José Manuel Barroso was nominated as Commission President in 2004, following the largest trans-national election in history at that point, and Parliament approved him by 431 votes to 251. The more revealing test came when MEPs scrutinised the nominees for his Commission in public committee hearings. The Civil Liberties committee rejected Rocco Buttiglione for the justice portfolio over his views on homosexuality, the first time Parliament had ever opposed an incoming Commissioner. Despite Barroso's initial insistence on Buttiglione, Parliament prevailed, and a number of other nominees also had to be withdrawn or reassigned before the Commission was approved. When Barroso sought a second term in 2009, another nominee, Bulgaria's Rumiana Jeleva, was forced out over concerns about her experience and financial interests. Parliament also demanded a package of concessions before confirming the second Barroso Commission, including the right for Parliament's president to attend high-level Commission meetings and observer status in EU-led international negotiations.

• 6. The Two-City Problem

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  Parliament operates from three cities: its official seat is in Strasbourg, where twelve plenary sessions a year are required under a protocol attached to the Treaty of Amsterdam, its committees meet primarily in Brussels, and its secretariat is housed in Luxembourg City. The two-seat arrangement cost an estimated €103 million extra per year compared to a single location, according to a 2013 European Parliament study, with the Court of Auditors adding a further €5 million in travel expenses. A study led by Jean Lambert and Caroline Lucas calculated that the arrangement generates over 20,268 additional tonnes of carbon dioxide annually. In August 2014, the European Court of Auditors assessed that moving the Strasbourg seat to Brussels would save €113.8 million per year. Critics, including Margot Wallström, who served as Commission First-Vice President from 2004 to 2010, have called it a symbol of waste. A poll found 89 percent of MEPs wanting a single seat, with 81 percent preferring Brussels. Yet France has declared the Strasbourg seat non-negotiable: because the location is fixed by treaty, any change requires unanimous agreement among member states plus national ratification, and France holds an effective veto as the only EU institution on French soil.

• 7. Corruption and Accountability

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  Qatargate, the most prominent corruption scandal in the Parliament's history, involved allegations that officials, lobbyists, and their families were influenced by the governments of Qatar, Morocco, and Mauritania to improve those countries' reputations within the EU and to suppress parliamentary resolutions criticising Qatar's human rights record. Belgian, Italian, and Greek law enforcement seized €1.5 million in cash and charged four people: Eva Kaili, former MEP Antonio Panzeri, Francesco Giorgi, and Luca Visentini. Later arrests included Niccolò Figà-Talamanca, Marc Tarabella, Andrea Cozzolino, Belgian MEP Marie Arena in 2023, and two further women in 2025: Elisabetta Gualmini and Alessandra Moretti. Panzeri's lobbying group, Fight Impunity, had received €250,000 from the Sekunjalo Development Foundation, controlled by South African billionaire Iqbal Survé, which was identified as the group's most important donor. A separate scandal involving Marine Le Pen, tried for paying National Front officials using funds earmarked for European Parliament assistants, ended on the 31st of March 2025 when a Paris court found Le Pen and her co-defendants guilty; she received a four-year prison sentence, two years suspended, plus a €100,000 fine and an immediate five-year ban from standing for office, ruling her out of the 2027 French presidential election. In response to these cases, Parliament revised its rules of procedure in September 2023, requiring MEPs to disclose all external income above €5,000, declare conflicts of interest, and file detailed declarations of assets and liabilities at the start and end of each term.

• 8. The World's Most Multilingual Parliament

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  Members of the European Parliament may speak in any of the 24 official EU languages during proceedings, from French and German to Maltese and Irish. Citizens may also address the Parliament in Basque, Catalan and Valencian and Galician. To make that possible, Parliament is the largest employer of interpreters in the world, retaining 350 full-time interpreters and up to 400 freelancers during periods of peak demand. A 2006 report by Alexander Stubb highlighted the financial scale of the arrangement: providing simultaneous interpretation across 21 languages then cost €118,000 per day, while restricting interpretation to English, French and German would reduce that figure to €8,900 per day. Interpretation is not a simple word-for-word exercise; interpreters must convey political meaning, requiring detailed preparation and an understanding of EU procedure. For minor language pairs with no direct interpreter available, such as Estonian into Maltese, a relay system routes speech through a third language. Because all proceedings are translated into all 24 official languages, the resulting multilingual corpus, known as Europarl, has become a widely used resource for training statistical machine translation systems.