The 2019 European Parliament election in Germany was held on 26 May 2019, electing the 96 members of the national Germany constituency to the

European Parliament The European Parliament (EP) is one of the legislative bodies of the European Union and one of its seven institutions. Together with the Council of the European Union (known as the Council and informally as the Council of Ministers), it adopts ...

. Both the CDU/CSU and SPD suffered major losses, while the Greens became the second largest party in a national-level election for the first time in German history.

Background

The 2019 European Parliament election was first national election to be held in Germany since the 2017 federal election, in which Chancellor

Angela Merkel Angela Dorothea Merkel (; ; born 17 July 1954) is a German former politician and scientist who served as Chancellor of Germany from 2005 to 2021. A member of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), she previously served as Leader of the Oppo ...

's ruling coalition between the

Christian Democrats __NOTOC__ Christian democratic parties are political parties that seek to apply Christian principles to public policy. The underlying Christian democracy movement emerged in 19th-century Europe, largely under the influence of Catholic social ...

and

Social Democrats Social democracy is a political, social, and economic philosophy within socialism that supports political and economic democracy. As a policy regime, it is described by academics as advocating economic and social interventions to promote so ...

suffered major losses, while the right-wing, Eurosceptic party Alternative for Germany (AfD) entered parliament in third place. In 2018, the Greens and the AfD made large gains in state elections in

Bavaria Bavaria ( ; ), officially the Free State of Bavaria (german: Freistaat Bayern, link=no ), is a state in the south-east of Germany. With an area of , Bavaria is the largest German state by land area, comprising roughly a fifth of the total lan ...

and

Hesse Hesse (, , ) or Hessia (, ; german: Hessen ), officially the State of Hessen (german: links=no, Land Hessen), is a States of Germany, state in Germany. Its capital city is Wiesbaden, and the largest urban area is Frankfurt. Two other major histor ...

, with the Greens moving into second place in each, whilst the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats each suffered 10+ point swings. Federal polling saw the Greens take a consistent lead over the SPD since October.

Electoral threshold

Since the

2014 European Parliament election The 2014 European Parliament election was held in the European Union, from 22 to 25 May 2014. It was the 8th parliamentary election since the first direct elections in 1979, and the first in which the European political parties fielded candid ...

, Germany does not have a formal threshold of the vote share required in order for a party to win an EP seat. This has allowed a number of smaller parties to gain representation, since they only have to reach about 0.5% of the vote share needed to get their first seat with the

Webster/Sainte-Laguë method The Webster method, also called the Sainte-Laguë method () or the major fractions method, is a method for allocating seats in a parliament among federal states, or among parties in a party-list proportional representation system. The metho ...

. Although the European Council had recommended that countries with greater than 35 MEPs should introduce a threshold between 2–5%, the German government abandoned its plans for a 2% threshold in November 2018.

Opinion polls

Graphical summary

Federal level

By state

Baden-Württemberg

Bavaria

Berlin

Hesse

Rhineland-Palatinate

Saarland

Results

Results by state

Results for each party by state.

Maps

Elected MEPs

References

{{German elections

Germany Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated betwe ...

European Parliament elections in Germany 2019 elections in Germany