Turnout: 37.18%
About this election
The 2019 European Parliament election in the United Kingdom was held on 23 May 2019 — an election the country was never supposed to take part in, having voted to leave the EU three years earlier. With Brexit delayed, the UK was legally obliged to participate, and the result was a thunderous protest vote. Nigel Farage's newly formed Brexit Party won decisively with 30.51% of the vote and 29 of the 73 seats, while the strongly pro-Remain Liberal Democrats came second with 19.58% and 16 seats. The two governing-era giants were humiliated: the Conservatives fell to fifth place on 8.80%, and Labour to third on 13.65%. Turnout was 37.18%.
Unlike Westminster elections, the European Parliament election in Great Britain used closed-list proportional representation (the d'Hondt method) across eleven regions — the nine English regions plus Scotland and Wales — each electing between three and ten MEPs. Northern Ireland, as its own single region, used the Single Transferable Vote to elect three MEPs. The UK elected 73 MEPs in total. The proportional system meant smaller parties could win real representation, in sharp contrast to the winner-takes-all logic of a general election.
The UK had been due to leave the EU on 29 March 2019, but with Theresa May unable to pass her withdrawal agreement through parliament, the departure was postponed to 31 October. That extension forced Britain to hold European elections it had hoped to avoid — a vivid symbol of the Brexit deadlock, and an irresistible opportunity for both Leave and Remain voters to register their anger with the two main parties.
The Brexit Party had been founded only months earlier, yet under Farage it ran a single-issue insurgency demanding that the referendum result be honoured, and topped the polls almost from launch. On the other side, the Liberal Democrats — campaigning under the blunt slogan "Bollocks to Brexit" — the Greens, the SNP and Plaid Cymru competed for the pro-Remain vote, while the new Change UK group of breakaway MPs failed to gain traction. The Conservatives, blamed for the Brexit chaos, and Labour, whose ambiguous position pleased neither side, were squeezed from both directions.
The Brexit Party finished first in nine of the eleven Great Britain regions, winning MEPs everywhere from the South West to Scotland. The Liberal Democrats topped the poll in London and surged across southern England, and the Greens recorded their best European result with seven MEPs. Labour lost more than half of its MEPs and the Conservatives were reduced from 19 seats to just 4 — a record low for a governing party. The SNP took the most seats in Scotland, and in Northern Ireland Sinn Féin, the DUP and, for the first time, the cross-community Alliance Party each won a single seat.
The election was widely read as a proxy second referendum. Combine the explicitly pro-Leave parties and they outpolled the explicitly pro-Remain parties only narrowly; both camps could, and did, claim the result vindicated their position. What was unambiguous was the collapse of the centre: voters used a low-stakes proportional election to punish the Conservatives and Labour for failing to resolve Brexit.
The map shows the Brexit Party's near-clean sweep of England, Wales and (in one seat) Scotland, broken only by the Liberal Democrats in London and the SNP in Scotland, with Northern Ireland splitting its three seats three ways. Click a region to see which parties won its MEPs.
The scale of the two main parties' humiliation reverberated at once. For the Conservatives, falling to fifth place — behind even the Greens — confirmed that Theresa May could not survive, and the leadership contest that followed was framed almost entirely around who could best neutralise the Brexit Party and its threat to the Conservative base; that question delivered the premiership to Boris Johnson and his "do or die" pledge to leave the EU by the end of October. For Labour, the loss of Remain-minded voters to the Liberal Democrats and the Greens intensified internal pressure on Jeremy Corbyn to commit unambiguously to a second referendum, deepening the divisions over Brexit strategy that would help sink the party at the general election six months later.
The result hastened Theresa May's resignation, announced two days later, and propelled Boris Johnson to the Conservative leadership on a promise to deliver Brexit "do or die". The UK's MEPs took their seats in July 2019 but served only until 31 January 2020, when the United Kingdom left the European Union and its delegation was withdrawn — making this the last European Parliament election Britain will hold as a member state.
Turnout was 37.18%, typical of European elections in the UK, where the contest had always drawn far lower participation than Westminster general elections — though in 2019 the unusually charged Brexit context lifted it slightly above the 2014 figure.
Results compiled by the House of Commons Library and the Electoral Commission — commonslibrary.parliament.uk.
Compiled and reviewed by Bartłomiej Paruzel, Election Data Analyst, from official results. See our data methodology.