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We're really at a moment where there's a lot of speculation and uncertainty at a time where the European Commission has taken on actually a much greater role in European citizens' life and whose own motto is to be a geopolitical

commission. It's the Lawfair Podcast. I'm Molly Reynolds, Senior Fellow at

Brookings and Senior Editor at Lawfair with Taravarma, Visiting Fellow, and Sophie Rosa,

Senior Research Assistant, both of the Center on the United States and Europe at Brookings.

These European level parties,

there are a lot of differences among them.

They're ideologically connected,

but this is a loose coalition of parties having some similar orientation but

there are still a lot of differences among the national parties which means

that there's often disagreements also on different policy issues and actually foreign policy

especially.

Today we're talking about the upcoming EU parliamentary elections.

All right, so we're going to dig into a bunch of topics today, but I want to start with the basics,

which is what is the role of the European Parliament and how do its elections work. So Sophie over to you.

Thank you Molly and thank you for having us on for this conversation today.

I want to start at the very beginning and maybe just remind us all of what the European Union is.

It is a political community of 27 member states and then the way the Parliament fits into the

European Union is it is one of the two legislative institutions within the European

...