European Parliament

The European Parliament is the directly elected parliamentary institution of the European Union(EU). Together with the Council of the European Union (the Council) and the European Commission, it exercises the legislative function of the EU.
The Parliament is composed of 736 Memebers of the European Parliament  (MEPs)directly elected every five years who serve the second largest democratic electorate in the world (after India) and the largest trans-national democratic electorate in the world (375 million eligible voters in 2009)
Parliament is the "first institution" of the EU and shares equal legislative and budgetary powers with the Council .
Parliament has two meeting places - 
Louise Weiss Building in Strasbourg,France which serves for twelve four-day plenary sessions  per year and is the official seat and 

The Espace Leopold Complex in Brussels,Belgium the larger of the two, which serves for committee meetings, political groups and complementary plenary sessions

The secretariat of the EuropeanParliament, the Parliament's administrative body, is in Luxembourg(a landlocked country in Western Europe bordered by Belgium,France and Germany)

The last Union-wide elections were the 2009 Parliamentary Elections. 

2009 European Parliament Elections

were held in the 27 member states of the EU between June 4-7,2009.This was the first European Parliament election that Bulgaria and Romania participated in at the same time as the other member states. When they joined the EU in 2007, they held elections for MEPs outside the normal electoral calendar.

 The admission of Bulgaria and Romania midway through the previous Parliament's term had increased the overall size of the assembly to 785, and under the terms of the Treaty of Nice it was mandated that the seat allocations be modified for this election, dropping 49 seats to keep the overall size of the Parliament down.

At present, the exact number of seats allocated to each country is determined by the treaties, currently the Treaty of Nice, and is adjusted by the accession treaty of each new member.According to the treaty of Nice, the maximum number of members in the Parliament is 736. However, this number may be exceeded temporarily when enlargements take place during a Parliamentary term. E.g. when Romania and Bulgaria joined in 2007, the number of seats temporarily increased to 785, but dropped back down to 736 at the 2009 election.

736 seats for about 500 million EU citizens means that there are on average 670,000 citizens represented by each MEP. But the number of seats for each country is not proportional to its share of population. Rather, the seats are distributed by an ad hoc scheme (see table below) which roughly follows degressive proportionality, i.e. the greater the population a state has, the more people there are per member.