What at first glance seem to be a unified election for the European Parliament between this Thursday and Sunday are actually 27 different electoral processes, with their rules, thresholds, constituencies and rarities, in the absence of a unified electoral law in all the countries of the European Union as the European Parliament has insistently requested.

The celebration of these elections on four different days is the first detail that attracts attention: it began this Thursday in the Netherlands and on Friday in Ireland and the Czech Republic, which extends the election day until today, Saturday.

Estonia, for its part, has already started with electronic voting this Monday and is the only country that allows it.

But the Czechs are not the only ones who have two days to go to vote; it is also the case of the Italians, who in turn set the record for the latest closing time of the polling stations at eleven on Sunday night.

Most countries, including Spain, attend their polling stations on Sunday the 9th.

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CEL

Each country also has its own rules regarding the voting margins necessary to get the first seat in the European Parliament: Spain accompanies thirteen other member states that have no threshold, but nine countries (Czech Republic, France, Croatia, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia) set it at 5%; in Italy, Austria and Sweden it is 4%; in Greece 3% and in Cyprus 1.8%.

Also the alternatives to vote if a citizen is abroad are very different depending on their country of origin: the Czech Republic, Ireland, Malta and Slovakia do not allow to do so, although most countries do offer voting by mail and/or in an embassy or consulate. France, the Netherlands and Belgium also allow the proxy vote, for an authorized person to vote for the absentee.

On the other hand, it is mandatory to go to vote in Luxembourg, Bulgaria, Belgium and Greece, but not in the rest of the Member States. And in Malta, Austria, Belgium and Germany, citizens from the age of 16 will go to the polls, and 17 in the case of those from Greece.

The electoral law remains a competence mainly assigned to national governments and these, as in so many other areas, do not want to cede their sovereignty when organizing their elections as it suits them best because of their national idiosyncrasy: sometimes such simple issues as a local holiday or rules that are already applied in national elections come into play.

The European Parliament has insisted several times on the need to harmonize a series of minimum concepts, especially with a view to reinforcing the European character of these elections, which until now are excessively marked by the dynamics of each country.

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Now two years ago, MEPs proposed, for example, that each European citizen should have two votes in the elections to the European Parliament: one equivalent to the current one, for the national lists, and an additional one for a single European constituency of 28 seats whose head of the list would be the candidate for the presidency of the European Commission.

In this proposal they also included that countries with more than 60 seats (Spain, Italy, France and Germany) had a minimum threshold of 3.5%, on May 9 (Europe Day) as a common voting day in all countries every five years and that the lists are compulsorily in zipper format (alternating a man and a woman successively) or with gender quotas to ensure equal representation.

The few characteristics common to all countries are reflected in the European electoral law of 1976, which protects the right of Europeans residing in another EU country to vote and stand for elections in their place of residence, a maximum threshold of 5%, the system of voting lists or transferable single vote and the incompatibilities to be an MEP