List of European Union member states by political system

This is a list of European Union member states, their forms of government and their parliaments. The European Union is a sui generis supranational union of democratic states. At a European Council Summit held in Copenhagen, Denmark, on 21 June and 22 June 1993, the European Union defined the Copenhagen criteria regarding the conditions a candidate country has to fulfill to be considered eligible for accession to the European Union:



Consequently, all European Union member states are directly elected democracies that are considered to be "free" according to the criteria of Freedom House (with all of them being rated 1/1 except for Greece and Italy with 1/2, and Bulgaria, Latvia and Romania with 2/2). As of 2011, all European Union member states are representative democracies; however, they do not all have the same political system, with most of the differences arising from different historical backgrounds.

Many of the states in the neighbourhood of the European Union are not considered to be "free" by the same criteria. Most European states neighbouring the European Union are considered to be "free" or "partly free" by Freedom House, with the exceptions of Azerbaijan, Belarus and Russia. On the other hand, almost all of the states in North Africa and Southwest Asia that neighbour the European Union are not considered to be...
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