How does the European parliament work?
There are 736 seats (down from 781 last time) distributed among the 27 member countries according to population. The parliament is the only bit of the European Union that’s elected, and is steadily increasing in power. It acts as an upper house to the European commission, reviewing and sometimes reversing EU law. So there are 736 seats and we’ve only got 72 of them; how can voting for anyone have any real impact on how Europe is run? Euro MEPs sit in big transnational groupings according to their political alignment. The centre-right European People’s party and European Democrats (EPP-ED) is the largest bloc, with 288 seats. The Tories belong to this group, but plan to leave it after the election and form a new caucus with some rather unpleasant sounding hard-right Eastern Europeans. Labour belongs to the second largest bloc, the Party of European Socialists (PES), and the Lib Dems, conveniently, belong to the third largest. The remaining groups are considerably smaller. Various no-mat
