European Democrats

European Democrats
European parliamentary group
Name	European Democrats
English abbr.	ED
French abbr.	DE
Formal name	European Democratic Group
Ideology	Conservatism Economic liberalism Euroscepticism
From	17 July 1979
To	1 May 1992
Preceded by	European Conservative Group
Succeeded by	European People's Party–European Democrats
Chaired by	James Scott-Hopkins, Henry Plumb, Christopher Prout
MEP(s)	63 (July 17, 1979) 50 (July 23, 1984) 34 (July 25, 1989)

The European Democrats was a loose association of conservative political parties in Europe. It was a political group in the European Parliament from 1979 until 1992, when it became a subgroup of the European People's Party–European Democrats (EPP-ED) group. The European Democrats continued to exist as a political group in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) until 2014, when it became the European Conservatives Group.

The European Democratic Group (ED) was formed on 17 July 1979 by British Conservative Party, Danish Conservative People's Party and other MEPs after their success in the 1979 elections. It supplanted the earlier European Conservative Group.

In the late seventies and early eighties, the ED was the third-largest political group in the European Parliament.

However, the group saw its membership fall sharply in the late 1980s, as many centre-right members moved to the rival European People's Party (EPP), dominated by the Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU), Italian Christian Democrats and the ideology of Christian democracy in general. The ED had been somewhat further from the political centre and less pro-European than the EPP. Largely isolated, even hardline eurosceptics like Margaret Thatcher conceded that the British Conservatives could not be effectively heard from such a peripheral group.