European Parliament Elections 2014 – parties and alliances

So far in my series about the 2014 elections for the European Parliament, I have done posts on why it matters and voter turnout. Essentially, the message so far is that the elections are important and more of you need to vote. In this post, I look at the varies parties and alliances and how they have changed over the years.

When researching this, I found myself comparing the number of splits, renamings and mergers to the number of divisions in the Christian religion. It is quite complex, but I will do my best to give you the information in an easy to understand form.

You will be familiar with the political parties in the United Kingdom. In theory, they are groups of people who agree on certain policies and ideals and come together to vote and ensure their agenda gets passed. Obviously, when you consider the amount of EU member states, you will realise that there any many different parties and ideals. This means the parties need to form alliances that work together to achieve common goals. It is important to remember that not all members will agree on everything though. Sometimes a member may disagree on many things or even something fundamental and it will cause a defection.

Composition of European Parliament (historic and current)

The alliances in the European Parliament have been noticeably fluid over the years. Some have simply changed their name. Some have done that as a result of a merger. Some have split in two. Others have just ceased to exist. These changes don’t always take place at the beginning of a new Parliamentary term either. Some have taken place part way through. For the purposes of this post, I am using figures for the beginning and end of each term. Some of the tables are large though, which is why I will be providing a link to a spreadsheet (that I put together) at the end of this post that contains full tables and more data for you to look at (if you want).

This table shows the historical MEP numbers for the current alliances and the beginning of each parliamentary term (the aforementioned spreadsheet has data for all alliances since 1979):

The following is a more visual representation of the above data:

This takes into account the various changes over the years to the current alliances. Three groups have been there since the beginning and this picture is more or less reflective of the current political scene. SOC/PES/S&D was the largest group at one time, but now has fewer members than the EPP/EPP-ED. The full name of the former is the ‘Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats’ and the Labour Party is part of it. The EPP (European People’s Party) was the home of the Conservatives, until recently. However, they switched to the ECR in 2009 (European Conservatives and Reformists).

The Liberal Democrats are aligned to the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe group (ALDE).

The EFD Group (Europe of Freedom and Democracy) is the home of UKIP MEPs. The Green Party, Plaid Cymru and the SNP are members of the Greens/EFA alliance. The lone Sinn Fein MEP is aligned to European United/Nordic Green Left.

Non-Attached members (also known as Non-Inscrits) include the likes of Nick Griffin. They are not aligned to any of the major alliances in the European Parliament and are therefore considered to have some extreme minority views.

In the spreadsheet I mentioned, you will see data and graphs for the MEP numbers in alliances at the end of each parliament. Please not that, for example, ‘2009’ refers to the end of the previous term (i.e. the previous term was 2004-2009 and the 2009 incoming members were after the elections at that time).

This shows the share of the composition after the 2009 election for the current alliances:

Since this period, there has been a few changes. For example, Godfrey Bloom ceased to be a member of the EFD group (still a member of UKIP though).

Changes

The following graphs show the changes in MEP numbers for the current alliances, since they began. Although ‘Non-Attached’ isn’t an alliance, I have included it for the sake of completeness.

This is for the changes based on data for the beginning of each parliamentary term:

This is similar to the above, but based on data at the end of each term:

The two largest groups have seen the largest changes by far.

One thing I should mention is that the MEP total at the end of a parliamentary has differed from the one at the beginning of a term a number of times. This is due to nations becoming new members and then electing MEPs. The incoming MEP total for the following term then goes down (having a membership that is too high may make decision making slower).

Finally…

I haven’t included outgoing data for the current parliamentary term in the graphs and tables simply because it isn’t complete yet. However, you can consult this web page for the current composition.

At various points in this post, I have mentioned a spreadsheet with more data and graphs. You can find it by clicking here.

You will see that Labour and the Lib Dems have not changed their chosen alliances since the first election in 1979. The Conservatives were the same until recently, but then they changed to an alliance where parties from less influential countries are members. Whilst they may not necessarily be in a bigger group, it doesn’t mean that the party’s ability to debate and influence policy has ceased completely.

Your choice of MEP will be to do with any number of reasons. It might be your opinion of the candidate. It might be to do with the UK party he is a member of or even your opinion of that party’s leader. You might also want to look at the alliances that the candidates parties are a part of though. You may disagree with the view of a party of another nation and if they are part of the same alliance as a particular candidate, you may worry that the candidate would share those view or vote for them later on.

The next post in the series will be the first of a few that focus on the European manifestos of the main UK parties. However, there will be a momentary break in this series whilst I cover other elections that have happened recently.

So, what do you think?