How to follow the activities and votes of your MEP
Members of the European Parliament represent you in EU decision-making. The Parliament’s website offers you tools to check their activities and discover how they vote.
Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) play an essential role in the EU political system as they pass or amend laws that affect almost 450 million Europeans. Members are democratically elected every five years and act in political groups.
The European Parliament is committed to working in full transparency. Parliament’s website offers a variety of ways to learn about and follow the activities of all MEPs.
Find individual MEPs and their work
Check out the Parliament’s MEPs page to search for Members by name, country or political group. Each Member has their own page that details all of their activities in the Parliament, as well as their contact information and social media accounts.
On the individual page of each MEP, you can view how they help shape EU policy through contributions to plenary debates, reports and other information in the tab “Main parliamentary activities”.
Details about the main areas of work of each MEP is available under the “Member” and “Substitute” sections, listing the committees they are part of. Parliamentary committees are responsible for drafting Parliament’s positions on specific issues falling under their area of competence.
The MEPs page gives you even more options: you can filter your search by political group or political body, view the full list of MEPs, learn about ethics and transparency rules in the Parliament, and make use of a variety of other search and information services.
Discover how MEPs have voted
The Parliament’s website offers the opportunity to see the results of every recorded vote, as well as to see the names and groups of MEPs that voted in favour, against, or abstained on those votes.
Keep in mind that to keep voting sessions short, many votes take place by show of hand, so there is no trace of who voted in favour or against. However, for the final vote on reports MEPs use the tracked electronic voting system. When a vote concerns a specific person, for example appointing someone to a post, the vote is secret and there is no information on which MEP voted how. An electronic roll-call vote can be taken upon request from a political group or at least one twentieth of all Members.
How to view the results of votes and information on MEPs that voted:
- Find the date of the vote that interests you - this can be done, for example, through the Parliament’s News page.
- Visit the plenary website, look for the Votes tab, then “Results of votes” and select the corresponding plenary session. For older plenaries, you can use the calendar on the bottom right of the page.
- Under the date of the vote, select “Results of votes”.
- In the list that appears, find the title of the vote that interests you and select it.
- In the table that appears, click on the number of votes, on the right-hand side. This number will be highlighted and clickable only for roll-call votes; otherwise, you might just see a + for adopted motions or a - for rejected ones.
- Upon selecting the number of votes, a new page will appear that shows the names and groups of MEPs, structured by how they voted.
Additionally, as Parliament provides data in open and machine-readable formats, these are used by other tools not affiliated to Parliament to display vote results or other useful information.
Watch plenary sessions and committee meetings
The Parliament’s Multimedia Centre hosts video recordings of almost all parliamentary activities, such as plenary sessions, committee meetings, press conferences, and debates, as well as a multitude of other visual and audio content. The “Search” field at the top of the page can be used to find material through keywords.
Alternatively, you can view a list of the plenary sessions, committee meetings, debates, and other long-form video content, sorted by date.
