Comment by normalnorm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by normalnorm | Hacker News Reader

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The European Council is made of the democratically elected Heads of State of each Member State. The European Council nominates the president of the European Comission, which again has one member per Member State. The European Parliament, which is composed of MEPs directly elected by the citizens of each member state, must ratify all nominations. The directly elected European Parliament has veto power on European Comission decisions, and so has every Member State.

A state can only join the EU by virtue of a democratic decision according to the constitution of the Member State itself, and there are strong requirements on prospective Member States to be themselves proper democracies with separation of powers in order to be allowed to join.

Granted, these requirements have been slightly overlooked when it came to the UK: the House of Lords is undemocratic, one could say outdated, and would almost certainly not be tolerated in any other candidate state.

So, the EU might be complex, but in what sense exactly is it undemocratic?

how does the normal citizen vote for the president of the European Commission? How do we vote them out if we dont like their governance anymore?

> how does the normal citizen vote for the president of the European Commission? How do we vote them out if we dont like their governance anymore?

As is the case with the chief executive in most parliamentary systems, by voting for an MP (in the case, MEP) of the party which backs their preferred (or opposes their opposed) candidate for leader.

ok so we have an MEP in parliament. But MEPs, can't initiate legislation, only approve it. The EU parliament is arguably the only parliament in the world where members of parliament are not allowed to make laws or initiate legislation. The institution that actually makes the laws in the EU is not the democratically elected members of parliament, but the unelected European Commissioners. This is the issue with the EU. Its a special club at the top, and the people who we can vote for don't really have any say in any of it. That alone is the best reason for it to go!

You've just shifted the goalpost here. You asked how to control who's the head of the Comission not how to initiate legislation.

But since you asked look at how little power a British MP has to get a private member's bill through to a vote. In actual fact the only private member's bills that get a vote let alone pass are those with government support.

How does one vote for the Queen or Lords?

not really the same thing and you know it. They are not passing them selves off as a democracy!

Wait, the U.K. isn’t a democracy, the queen is no longer the head of state, and the House of Lords no longer has a role in legislature or government? That’s news to me.

The UK is not passing itself off as a democracy?

Also the House of Common's isn't really democratic in any meaningful sense of the word. It took 886,400 votes to get 1 Green MP but only 25,900 votes per SNP MP. Similarly 38,300 per Conservative MP to 336,000 per LibDem MP. That's an order of magnitude difference between votes to power.

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