This is not from the Parliament. This is from the Council of Ministers. All shitty ideas in the EU come from there or from the Commission. These bodies are not elected and have very little, and very indirect, democratic legitimation.
Parliament is directly elected
Many ministers are initially elected to posts in their national parliament and then promoted into a government job. But this is not a real requirement, and many aren't. And even those that we elected, we elected for national jobs, not for the EU, and I do think that that makes a difference. This is what I mean by indirect legitimation.
> Parliament is directly elected
Yes.
And that leaves the Commission, which is mostly former-ministers-who-need-a-job and are appointed based on negotiations between the governments.
Generally we don’t have a directly elected ministers in Europe, just like the US don’t elect the Secretary of State, they are selected by the head of government. Unlike the US they tend to be elected people.
This is all mostly true. But also very indirect, yes? I remember the discussions about the EU constitution project and the treaty of Lisbon, and this system with national government representatives was sold to us as a necessary democratic counterweight to the "dominance" of the most populous states (especially Germany) in Parliament. I acknowledge the need for some kind of balancing between pure population majority one the one hand and the needs of smaller states on the other hand. A proper elected "upper house" similar to the US Senate, with a fixed number (more than two!) of members from each member state, would be vastly superior to the current system.
(Also, when the corrupt Austrian government collapsed last year, it was replaced for half a year with an "expert cabinet", with a chancellor and ministers who were all very capable and all, but not politicians, and never elected for any position. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bierlein_government They did refrain from big EU-level moves, but nothing would have stopped them.)
Nowhere near superior systems like the U.K. where members leave te room, spend a couple of hours queuing to go into one of two rooms, and then see the result later in the day.
https://boingboing.net/2019/03/26/jfc-fml-jfc.html
> But actually, a group of Swedish MEPs have revealed that they pressed the wrong button, and have asked to have the record corrected. They have issued a statement saying they'd intended to open a debate on amendments to the Directive so they could help vote down Articles 11 and 13.
> We lost on a technicality, and there is no recourse.
How thick are our representatives?
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-16746389
It's clear your example that they (Swedish MEPs) were all agreed to vote in this direction, since they each press their own button. It's most likely that they didn't understand the significance of the vote and thought better of it afterwards.
It's their one job, to vote.
> A spokesman for Mr Stunell, MP for Hazel Grove, said he had voted against the Labour amendment "as he was supposed to" and had gone to get a drink of water for a fellow minister when he found that lobby doors had been "locked".
> "He was temporarily on the wrong side but sanity prevailed and they let him out," he said.
A funny story, but not a legally significant outcome.
Here, it's suggested that MPs sometimes vote both ways to cancel their own mistake out, although they normally claim that they are taking some nuanced view: https://www.publicwhip.org.uk/boths.php
Not to mention that UK MPs can't vote if they have to be absent for any reason - for example if they have child-care duties.
Your original point was that the UK Commons' system of slow voting is foolproof: it isn't.