Under Rule 15 of Parliament’s Rules of Procedure, candidates for the presidency may be put forward either by a political group or by 1/20th of Members. To be elected, a candidate must win an absolute majority of the valid votes. If no candidate is elected in the first ballot, the same or other candidates can be nominated for a second round under the same conditions. Four candidates stood for election. David Sassoli was elected as the new President of the European Parliament on 3 July 2019 with 345 out of 667 valid votes in the second round. Sassoli will now lead Parliament until January 2020.
Sassoli has been an Italian MEP since 2009, and was re-elected on a Partito Democratico list in Central Italy in May 2019 for a third term.
Immediately after the vote, President Sassoli provided:
“In these months, too many people have fuelled divisions and conflicts that we thought were a sad reminder of our history. Instead, the citizens have shown that they still believe in this extraordinary path, the only one capable of providing answers to the global challenges before us”.
“We must have the strength to relaunch our integration process, changing our Union so to be able to respond more strongly to the needs of our citizens and give real answers to their concerns, to their increasingly widespread sense of loss.”
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