2019 European Parliament Election May 23-26,2019

The election to the European Parliament is being held between May 23-26,2019 and is the ninth parliamentary election since the first direct elections in 1979. 

As of 2018, a total of 751 Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) represent more than 512 million people from 28 member states.

Tens of millions of Europeans will vote Sunday as 21 countries choose their representatives in a battle between the nationalist right and pro-EU forces to chart a course for the bloc.

Greece, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Lithuania and Cyprus were the first to open their polling stations at 0400 GMT and France, Germany, Italy and the rest followed over the next two or three hours.

Seven EU member states had already voted, but no official results can be published until rest of the union has taken part. The European Parliament will give an estimate at 1815 GMT and provisional results will begin to emerge from 2100 GMT.

Britain and the Netherlands were first to vote, on Thursday, followed by Ireland and the Czech Republic on Friday with Slovakia, Malta and Latvia on Saturday, leaving the bulk of the 400 million eligible voters to join in on Sunday.

At the last EU election in 2014, Slovakia had the lowest turnout of any country, at less than 14 %, and centrist president Andrej Kiska is worried that the far-right is poised to profit.

The western world’s largest democratic exercise is nearing its finale as tens of millions of EU citizens in 21 countries go to the polls on Sunday, the last of four days of voting in European parliament elections that will shape the bloc’s future.

Polls suggest the vote will produce a more fragmented parliament than ever before, with the two centre-right and centre-left groups that have dominated Europe’s politics forecast to lose their joint majority for the first time, and nationalist and populist forces to make gains.

Both pro- and anti-EU politicians see the elections as a route to controlling Europe’s agenda. The French president, Emmanuel Macron, who is locked in domestic struggle with far-right leader Marine Le Pen, said the vote comes at “the most perilous moment for Europe since the second world war”