Key changes, while the UK is still part of the European Parliament:

The UK government has officially announced that the United Kingdom will participate in the European elections. We therefore provide an alternative scenario, which includes the UK in the seat projection, based on the latest polls in the UK. This scenario is based on the pre-Brexit seat distribution (751 total seats, 73 for the UK) and strongly differs from the planned Brexit seat redistribution (705 total seats, without the UK)

Key changes include:

1. The UK could shift the European Parliament to the right. With the UK, the right wing Eurosceptic block (ECR, EAPN (ex-ENF) and other far right parties) could win around 23.0% of the seats, compared to 20.2% without the UK. This right wing shift is mainly linked to the projected results of UKIP, the Brexit Party, and the British Conservative Party, which could win around 1, 25 and 8 seats respectively in the European Parliament (see ‘Block view’ tab of our double pie chart).

2. The conservative EPP, the biggest centre-right group, could see its relative seat share decrease from about 26.4% without the UK to 24.0% with the UK, due to the fact that the British Conservative party is not a member of the EPP group but is currently part of the more Eurosceptic ECR group.

[This text is based on calculations from 25/05/19. If you want to see the exact time when our seat projections were automatically updated, see the aggregate data files in our Open Data Hub.]

For how long will the UK remain in the European Parliament?

The UK and the EU recently reached an agreement on extending the Brexit deadline until the 31.10.19. The British government confirmed on 07.05.2019 that the UK will be taking part in the European elections, as the time has run out for the country to leave the EU before the elections.

We continue to provide a projection both with and without the UK, given that it is unclear for how long British MEPs will stay in the European Parliament (EP) after the elections. There is a possibility that the British MEPs will not take their seats in the EP at all, if an agreement is reached before the EP's inaugural session on 02.07.19; they could leave a few months later, once the UK leaves the EU; or in case of a change of government or a second referendum with a pro-EU outcome, they could remain in the EP longer term. We therefore consider a projection without the UK to still be of interest.