President of the European Parliament in the context of "Antonio Tajani"

Elections to the European Parliament take place every five years by universal adult suffrage; with more than 400 million people eligible to vote, they are the second largest democratic elections in the world after India's.

Until 2019, 751 MEPs were elected to the European Parliament, which has been directly elected since 1979. Since the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the EU in 2020, the number of MEPs, including the president, has been 705. No other EU institution is directly elected, with the Council of the European Union and the European Council being only indirectly legitimated through national elections. While European political parties have the right to campaign EU-wide for the European elections, campaigns still take place through national election campaigns, advertising national delegates from national parties.

The European People's Party (EPP) is a European political party with Christian democratic, liberal-conservative, and conservative member parties. A transnational organisation, it is composed of other political parties. Founded by primarily Christian-democratic parties in 1976, it has since broadened its membership to include liberal-conservative parties and parties with other centre-right political perspectives. On 31 May 2022, the party elected as its President Manfred Weber, who was also EPP's Spitzenkandidat in 2019.

The EPP has been the largest party in the European Parliament since 1999 and in the European Council since 2002. It is also the largest party in the current European Commission. The President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen and the President of the European Parliament Roberta Metsola are from the EPP. Many of the founding fathers of the European Union were also from parties that later formed the EPP.

The State of the Union address, also known as the State of the European Union or SOTEU, is the annual speech addressed by the President of the European Commission to the European Parliament plenary session in September. The State of the Union address of the European Union was instituted by the Lisbon Treaty (with the 2010 Framework Agreement on relations between the European Parliament and the European Commission - Annex IV(5)), in order to make political life of the Union more democratic and transparent than it previously had been.

The Framework Agreement thus also foresees that the President of the European Commission sends a letter of intent to the President of the European Parliament and the Presidency of the Council of the European Union that sets out in detail the actions the European Commission intends to take by means of legislation and other initiatives until the end of the following year. The address is then followed by a plenary debate on the political situation of the Union, the so-called State of the Union debate.

Jerzy Karol Buzek ([ˈjɛʐɨ ˈbuzɛk] ; born 3 July 1940) is a Polish politician and former Member of the European Parliament from Poland. He has served as Prime Minister of Poland from 1997 to 2001, since being elected to the European Parliament in 2004, he served as President of the European Parliament between 2009 and 2012. He is married to Ludgarda Buzek and is the father of Polish actress Agata Buzek.

There are fourteen vice-presidents of the European Parliament who sit in for the president in presiding over the plenary of the European Parliament.

There is no official title of President of the European Union (or President of Europe), but there are a number of presidents of European Union institutions, including:

• the President of the European Council (since 1 December 2024, António Costa)
• the President of the European Commission (since 1 December 2019, Ursula von der Leyen)
• the President of the European Parliament (since 11 January 2022, Roberta Metsola)

Alongside these the Council of the European Union (also known as the Council of Ministers or simply "the Council") containing 27 national ministers, one of each nation, rotates its presidency by country. This presidency is held by a country, not a person; meetings are chaired by the minister from the country holding the presidency (depending on the topic, or "configuration"), except for the Foreign Affairs Council (one so-called "configuration" of the Council of the EU), which is usually chaired by the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy. The Presidency of the Council of the European Union has been held by Denmark since 1 July 2025.

Roberta Metsola (née Tedesco Triccas; born 18 January 1979) is a Maltese politician who has served as the president of the European Parliament since January 2022. She is a member of Malta's Nationalist Party (PN) and the European People's Party (EPP).

Metsola was first elected as a member of the European Parliament (MEP) in 2013, and became the First Vice-President of the European Parliament in November 2020. Following the death of the incumbent president David Sassoli, Metsola was elected as president of the European Parliament on 18 January 2022, becoming the youngest ever president, the first Maltese person to hold the office, and the first female president since 2002.