While a bumper crop of pro-European MEPs would be a great outcome of the European Parliament elections on May 23, a majority of voters backing pro-EU parties is key to winning a public vote on Brexit.
The two things are not the same. Although the D’Hondt voting system used in European Parliament elections is more proportional than the winner-takes-all method used to pick British MPs, parties with too few votes still risk walking away with no MEPs at all.
This could mean fewer MEPs for the smorgasbord of parties campaigning for a public vote on Brexit – such as the Lib Dems, Greens and Change UK, plus Plaid Cymru in Wales and SNP in Scotland. They will be fighting for many of the same pro-European voters. If the vote is split, they might prevent each other winning MEPs.
A lot also depends on how Labour positions itself during these elections. In particular, will Jeremy Corbyn’s party explicitly campaign for a public vote on any Brexit outcome? This makes electoral sense, with the most recent polling suggesting that failure to court pro-European voters in this way could hand victory to Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party.
In the UK, the European elections are broken down into 12 voting regions which each elect a different number of MEPs (read more about how the vote works here). The number of votes needed to win an MEP is different in each region – essentially the more MEPs up for grabs the lower the vote share needed.
The table below shows the number of MEPs being elected in each of the 12 regions. It also shows the share of the vote that the final party to win an MEP had in the 2014 European elections, once the D’Hondt system had accounted for seats already allocated (read an explainer on how that works here).
Although the D’Hondt system seems fairer than the first-past-the-post system used in general elections, the cut off can produce some gutting results. For example, in 2014 the Lib Dems got over 10% in the South West and still didn’t get any MEPs.
No clear tactics are emerging among the major pro-EU parties over how to avoid falling foul of D’Hondt. Renew, a small pro-EU party which was set up ahead of the 2017 general election, has thrown its support behind Change UK. But similar compromises between Change UK and the Lib Dems look like a non-starter, reports the FT.
It seems inevitable that the pro-European field will be fragmented in these elections. But don’t lose heart! We should be looking beyond the number of MEPs allocated to each party and to the total vote share for all parties backing a public vote on Brexit. If a majority emerges in the country behind these parties, then we have a powerful message to send MPs as the Brexit process rumbles on without a solution into the summer.
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