Turnout: 48.31%
About this election
Italy held European Parliament elections on 8-9 June 2024, choosing 76 of the chamber's 720 members. Brothers of Italy (FdI), the party of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, won 28.76% and 24 seats — its best-ever European result and the highest of any Italian party — confirming Meloni's dominance of national politics. The Democratic Party (PD) under Elly Schlein came second with 24.11% and 21 seats, a clear recovery from its 2022 general-election showing. The Five Star Movement won 9.98% (8 seats), Forza Italia 9.59% (8) and the Lega 8.97% (8). Turnout was 48.31%.
Italy elects its MEPs by proportional representation with preferential voting: voters choose a party list and may cast up to three preferences for individual candidates. The country is divided into five large constituencies (North-West, North-East, Centre, South and Islands), but a single national 4% threshold applies, and each party's seats are then distributed across the five constituencies. MEPs serve five-year terms.
The election effectively became a contest between Meloni's FdI and Schlein's PD, the two leaders who had reshaped their parties. FdI's commanding first place cemented Meloni's authority, while the PD's strong second — well ahead of its 2022 result — re-established it as the clear leader of the opposition, consolidating a more bipolar Italian politics around the two of them.
The most dramatic shift from 2019 was the decline of the Lega. Under Matteo Salvini it had topped the 2019 European election with over 34%; by 2024 it had fallen to around 9%, losing the bulk of its seats, as much of its support migrated to FdI. The reversal underlined how completely Meloni had supplanted Salvini as the dominant figure of the Italian right.
As the first nationwide test of Meloni's government, held alongside local elections, the result was a clear endorsement: the three governing right-wing parties together took around 47% of the vote. It strengthened Meloni's hand both at home and in Brussels, where her European Conservatives and Reformists group sought greater influence in the new Parliament.
In the May 2019 European election the Lega had won 34.26% and 28 seats under Salvini, then at the height of his first coalition government with the Five Star Movement; the PD took 22.74%, M5S 17.06%, and Meloni's FdI just 6.44% and 5 seats. The transformation by 2024 — FdI quadrupling its share while the Lega collapsed — captured the wholesale realignment of the Italian right in only five years.
Italian Ministry of the Interior (Ministero dell'Interno) — elezioni.interno.gov.it.
Compiled and reviewed by Bartłomiej Paruzel, Election Data Analyst, from official results. See our data methodology.