it's even worse than that
prior to the election there was the usual stuff you'd expect: potential candidates begin interviewed by the press, television debates, where they would explain what they planned to do if they won, why their policy was the right one, etc
then after the election all of those candidates were discarded and von der Leyen was appointed as commission president
despite not being named prior or participating in the process of democratic scrutiny at all
total farce
That is as "elected" as many heads of government i.e. any prime minister system
Directly electing presidents doesn't necessarily lead to better outcomes
How is that not indirectly democratic then?
Because that's what happened in 2016 and many times before that.
Glass House, stones, etc.
You could also make the case that representative democracies aren't as good as direct democracies because citizens don't get to vote on laws directly.
Obviously there are trade offs between having elected heads of the executive who are more directly accountable to the citizenry but have less subject matter knowledge vs indirectly elected executive who have somewhat less accountability but more knowledge. There is also the case of less corruption because the indirectly elected heads of the executive aren't as beholden to special interests. Which I personally feel is a huge benefit.
Unless these heads of the executive need private sector jobs after their tenure.
It‘s the national governments standing in the way of that, not the EU itself.
The solution to people making uninformed votes is to inform them, not to lessen their ability to vote.
For starters, we could examine the logs of all messages between Pfizer and the Commission. These logs are held by independent ISPs on both sides of the Atlantic and thus ought to be resistant to tampering.
But was she not elected by EU members of parliment, who were elected by EU citizens?
Every country I have ever lived in had a similar arrangement, I control who are elected to parliament, parliament votes for president, and the president serves at the pleasure of partliment.
Not that this is an endorsement of the EU or Ursula von der Leyen, I'm not an EU citizen, don't live in an EU country, and don't care to live in one either.
I think the main issue with EU is that it too much is decided at the EU level, but this to me is not related to it using a parliamentary system or Ursula not being elected directly by EU citizens, I think it is more related to what powers they can exercise.
Many (of the interested) people in the EU are unhappy about some democratic shortcomings of the EU. The only directly elected body is the parliament and it is not very powerful. There is too little power at directly elected bodies and too much power at elements, that are far from the voters reach.
At the last election they wanted to address that and promised that the lead candidate of the party with the most votes will be the commissioner.
That didn't happen. Instead we got vdL, who was in trouble as Minister of Defense in Germany for some hiring consultants without proper process and for ... deleting messages from her phone.
The whole situation is extremely painful for people like me, who support the EU. The tone-deafness, the disrespect for the voter. It is painful.
That and the idea that they would have a lot more control after brexit while in reality the world is more complicated than that. E.g. they lose negotiation power in important trade deals because nowadays Britain is just a tiny island with little to say. A lot of other laws are influenced by international treaties between bigger economical powers as well.
Yeah no, that's 100% inaccurate, which a study you can read at : http://csi.nuff.ox.ac.uk/?p=1153 will show...
Quote:...
What reasons do people give to justify their vote choice for Leave or Remain? And, what are the reasons they think the other side voted as they did? New briefing note CSI Brexit 4: People’s Stated Reasons for Voting Leave or Remain. Summary of the findings:
Several different surveys and opinion polls have asked Britons why they voted the way they did in the EU referendum. The two main reasons people voted Leave were ‘immigration’ and ‘sovereignty’, whereas the main reason people voted Remain was ‘the economy’.
Analysis of data from the Centre for Social Investigation’s longitudinal survey on attitudes to Brexit bolsters these conclusions.
Among four possible reasons for voting Leave, ‘to teach British politicians a lesson’ is ranked last by an overwhelming majority of Leave voters, contrary to the claim that Brexit was a ‘protest vote’.
Among four possible reasons for voting Remain, ‘a strong attachment to Europe’ is ranked last by a sizable majority of Remain voters, consistent with the claim that Britons have a relatively weak sense of European identity.
When asked to rank the reasons why their counterparts voted the way they did, Leave voters characterise Remain voters more accurately than Remain voters characterise Leave voters. In particular, Remain voters underestimate the importance that Leave voters attach to the EU having no role in UK law-making.
As for losing negotiation power, since Brexit the UK has negotiated multiple Billions of GBP worth of trade deals around the world. The OECD and the IMF are forecasting that the UK economy will be above the Eurozone economy. (https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn02...)
How's that for a tiny island.
I'm not sure I follow your negotiation power argument either. It was necessary. The UK needed to negotiate trade deals and they have them now, that does not mean this was done from a position of strength. I of course hope that they managed to negotiate the best they could.
Regarding the statistics you bring up... What exactly are you looking at and over what time period? An interesting question would be how the UK could have performed had they stayed in the EU.
I ask because your link mentions the following: > "For 2021 as a whole, UK GDP growth was 7.4%. This was the highest in the G7. The UK had the largest decline in GDP among the G7 in 2020 (-9.3%) and its relatively strong performance in 2021 was to some degree a recovery from weakness in 2020."
Maybe something has changed since 2014. Something big like the UK leaving the EU, which was one of the main things that kept Scotland in the UK.
They didn't but they won the last scottish general election with the clear program that they want to hold another indepence vote and that they will go for independence. Together with the Green party (also independence supporters) they have a pretty decent mayority. If I assume that everybody who voted for the will vote for indepence, then it is a done deal.
Also I can put 2 + 2 together. At the last independence vote people vote to stay in the UK to stay in the EU. At the Brexit vote 62% of the people voted for remain and not just that: every council in Scotland saw Remain majorities. The next independece vote is about to go back to the EU, so I assume people who vote to stay in the EU will vote to be in the EU again.
Also, the average Scotish is angry, because in the UK there are 39,860,400 voter in England and 4,079,600 voters in Scotland so it rarely matters what does the people in Scotland voting for. Also, they will be even more angry and desperate when they will get the winter energy bill (which will be 2-3x the last winter energy bill and a lots of people need to think about if the want to eat or stay warm). And they will be even more angry every time they are going to be told that you cannot vote again on their independence, because they will feel ignored again and they will not vote rationally. They will vote against the UK and against the current UK government because they had enough of not being able to have a say in what happening in Scotland (and it does no matter if this is true or not, the only thing matters if people belive it is true)
How do I know the people are angry and why they are angry? I live here and I talk to people.
I care about trade deals because trade deals are how many bad laws like the ever-expanding copyright are spread around the world.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but: I am in the UK, and I absolutely 100% do not feel that any vote of mine matters more now that we have left the EU. (And, also, there are votes I no longer get to cast -- e.g., those for members of the European Parliament.)
This very close, pretty much about equal to the election process of the US senate before the 17th amendment in 1912.[2] The difference being no popular vote for the president. As is the case for the "head of state" for pretty much all European countries. Exceptions are only France?
The major difference is that only the commission has the right to legislative initiative. To balance this the EU parliament can dissolve the commission based on a vote of no confidence.
So all in all, it's a truly democratic system with all the checks and balances. The major difference is the lack of cross European parties, thus your choice becomes collected together in the same basket as what your chosen party thinks is the right path. Completely through representative democracy, either from the head of government or European parliament.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_of_the_European_Union
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seventeenth_Amendment_to_the_U...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Commission#Dismissal
[4]: Kurzgesagt - Is the EU Democratic? Does Your Vote Matter? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4Uu5eyN6VU
Then, suddenly, in early 20th century, the federal US government made a huge power grab, and now the states are mostly just subjects of it, with much less sovereignty remaining. That’s what some EU skeptics are concerned about as well: sudden sweep and becoming subjects of Brussels.
Every Western "democracy" suffers from the same fundamental problem - entrenched deep state, and a lack of feedback loop towards it. It's extremely hazy where, how and by whom decisions are truly made, and as a consequence, nobody ever faces any consequences if those decisions flop. People like Biden, Harris, Johnson or Truss are so glaringly incompetent that nobody even suspects them to have any input into the decision process, they're simple announcers. Elections allow us to change the announcers, but change nothing about the deep state that ultimately dictates the policies. Brussels works the same way, it's just makes the fundamental problem more obvious
Two or even several things can be true at the same time.
Yes, some decision making transcends legistlative periods of elected officials. Other decisions are actively brought in and executed.
Yes, there is a lack of feedback loop. Sometimes there are public compliance investigations after the fact.
Yes, some politicians are incompetent and have risen due to other qualifications, be it greed, be it communication. Some politicians may just not show their qualifications in the few moments when all the spotlight is on them.
Democracies are imperfect exactly not because there is a centralized hidden agenda going on but because people like you and I with emotions and ego participate in every step of the process.
Yes democracies are painfully slow to respond to change, don't catch all malicious actors in its executive branch and live with an oversized public servant body most of the time, but so help me any spiritual being you might know or believe in I'd choose to live in one any day of the week over autocracies where everything is nicely simple and announced by one, all competent super hero.
I'd recommend watching an annual People Congress of the CCP or how Putler auditions his inner circle and scolds them like school boys and then let's have a talk about the deep state.
We need some stability otherwise fast talking demagogues and mob sentiment would routinely upset the apple cart. The bureaucracy (aka the "deep state") provides that.
But what you point out is also a problem. How do you get rid of corruption and incompetence when they routinely circle the wagons to protect their own and are beyond the reach of the voters? It is a big problem in Western society right now.
I've never heard anyone say they think their vote "matters more" because of Brexit. Aside from the fact it is patently untrue (we still use the least democratic and most divisive method, FPTP) the EU Parliament elections are actually more democratic by virtue using PR, which allowed UKIP to send a load of MEPs to Brussels.
More than a smaller party could ever get into Westminster even if they had a similar proportion of support due to our broken democracy.
The EU parliament can only "elect" a president nominated by the European Council, just like it can only approve laws proposed by the European Commission. It doesn't have the right of initiative, only veto power.
That being said I have to agree it is not ideal if they can only approve or veto.
> But was she not elected by EU members of parliment, who were elected by EU citizens?
This is a common argument when criticizing the EU, but in the end everybody is elected by the people of EU (directly or indirectly). Here is a quick video explaining how it works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4Uu5eyN6VU
Good video, thanks.
Technically she was nominated by the European Council, i.e. the heads of state of the 27 member countries. EU Parliament is called to approve or reject the nomination of the entire Commission, which is theoretically set up by the candidate president (in practice national governments have a big say, and there are formulas to guarantee representation in the cabinet for every country in a cyclical manner).
Whether that is democratic or not, well... if they don't trust their own head of state, I reckon their democratic system has bigger problems than some text messages.
Then the proper quest is if you trust 27 heads of state, only 1 of which you have any political influence over.
Also, EUParliament gives us a direct say in practice. People worried about the democratic deficit in the EU should push their own governments to relinquish more powers from Council to Parliament.
I really don't get who looks at the existing continent-size governments and says "yeah, I want that to be the model for how I'm governed"
I am from a small country, and I think this bring a perspective of inherent relatedness that people from larger countries lack. Control can't be binary, nor should it be. We're together with many others.
We've never been more in control of ourselves than we are right now.
"Americans manage to do it, after all."
Americans fought a brutal civil war to ensure the federal government would continue to enjoy supremacy over the states. In the modern era, about half of Americans currently think their country is heading for a second civil war, according to opinion polls. In recent days you're seeing elected federal politicians directly state that people should disobey rulings of the Supreme Court and laws of state governments. You've had federal agencies spying on and directly attacking elected presidents, with no consequences.
So it is absolutely not clear that Americans manage to do this, in a timeless/stable sense. They've managed it in the 20th century but for most of that time they had serious external enemies to bind the country together. Historically speaking, very large and powerful governments tend to collapse from internal decay, splintering into small countries. The number of countries rapidly increased in the 20th century as empires fell apart and new countries formed in their wake. Very few/no people regret this process - you don't see many people hankering after the Ottoman Empire or USSR, do you? A lot of the instability in the Middle East is a legacy of this process, for example.
A glance at any opinion poll shows there is nowhere near a majority for leaving the EU in any member country.
Politicians who used to talk about it as a goal, such as Le Penn in France, no longer mention it at all, having seen how chaotic it was for the UK.
Actually, you have to be careful with polls. Polling showed a very clear and strong majority of the British population did not like the EU and were basically opposed to it, but a significant chunk of those people were scared of the threatened economic and tax consequences (which were in the end a lie - there was no emergency tax hike and no recession). If they had not been threatened with ruin then the Leave vote would have been much higher.
The EU has demonstrated it is willing to create essentially unlimited amounts of disruption in order to stop countries leaving. It won't play nice, or respect the wishes of the electorate. It will fight them. Inevitably that scares people, it did in the UK too. This does not mean that those people actually like their situation.
People didn't vote to remain in the EU because they were scared, no matter how much you want it to be that way. There are real tangible benefits of EU membership that UK citizens didn't want to loose.
Last I checked the UK had left, it has not been stopped. That one thing caused a lot of problems for the conspiracy theorists and anti-EU crowd who were suggesting it was not possible for a country to leave. Now the goal posts have been moved on that argument to the EU trying to make it "as hard as possible".
I wonder if leaving the UK is harder than leaving the EU. We might get to find out soon.
Politicians try to minimize the power of voters to maximize their own power, and therefore love adding more layers, enabling things like gerrymandering etc. Those problems exists in the US system, but most EU countries avoids those problems, so to EU citizens moving to the American model is a huge step in an undemocratic direction.
> to EU citizens moving to the American model is a huge step in an undemocratic direction.
No, it's a huge step towards a continent-size governance model, which inevitably requires new ways to interpret the popular will. We're still at the early stages of this process, a process that will probably never end - like it never ended for nation-size governments.
The Italian president is un-elected (chosen by parliament).
Also, what does this mean for Spain, whose head of state is a King?
Im sure "head of state" means "effective ruler of the country", a PM in Italy, the president of France. But ut just points to the Byzantine rules the EU has created in 20 (or is it 30? Or is it 70?) years.
There is nothing Byzantine about pragmatically accommodating the differences between the political systems of independent states
The alternative would be.... Requiring all states to not call their monarchs heads of state? Removing their monarchies? Having the same political system? Pointless dogmatism
Which is the original argument here, namely that the EU has a large democratic deficit
In short: the EU citizens vote for Member of the European Parliament who represents own country and the Europarties. Citizens have no direct control over: the European Council, the president of the council, the European Commission and the president of the comission. You might get the feeling that as EU citizens we have little control over what runs over our heads on EU levels and because of this, a criticism might be observed over how truly democratic the EU is and if some bodies of the EU represent their citizens or particular goals of the Comission and their members.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_legitimacy_of_the_E...
Maybe (surely) the EU could be restructured to be even more democratic, but isn't that also true for pretty much every country in the world?
Like personally I would like if you could, at both national and EU level, but the fact that you can't isn't a specific failure of the EU.
1. National governments do not have control. That implies that for each government, they could ensure the outcome they wanted, which is impossible in a shared legal system. In the era of the veto, you could argue that they had at least the very minimal level of control over change (by stopping it), but the EU has been systematically removing national vetos.
2. Even when vetos did exist, they were hardly 'control' as a regular person would understand it. That would be akin to arguing that as long as a car has a working brake you're in control even if you can't move the steering wheel or stop the engine.
3. We don't actually know the national governments control who becomes EU Commission President. We believe this to be the case because in theory the treaties say that's how it works, but the EU routinely violates its own treaties. For example the treaties say that the Commission gets Commissioners allocated and the national governments control those assignments. In practice the former president (Juncker) boasted in public that he vetoed any commissioner he didn't like. This is not allowed under the treaties but, happens anyway.
4. The actual process by which vDL became President is entirely and completely opaque. The national leaders walked into a locked room and ... something happened. Then vDL was announced as leader. How was that decision arrived at? Which countries voted for her or against her, and why? Was there even a vote at all? Are leaders being threatened or bought? The question may sound absurd but actually the EU has quite bad problems with corruption, and effectively buying support via massive subsidies to poorer countries is a core tactic.
The point is, nobody can answer these questions because the EU is completely opaque. vDL refusing to release critical negotiations in direct violation of EU law is entirely expected from this system; the EU has lots of laws and regulations but they are always ignored the moment they become inconvenient. No system that claims to be democratic can tolerate such levels of opacity.
One last point. The assumption in your argument above is that if voters elect a politician they will actually represent the people who elected them. At the individual / leadership level it is fairly well known that the EU routinely corrupts politicians into going against voter's wishes by offering to hire them into the Commission temporarily after they lose elections. These jobs come with absolutely massive "pensions" that are well out of line with any normal pension, which require virtually no work to obtain, which can be claimed before reaching retirement age and which can be rescinded if the recipient is disloyal! In effect these so-called "pensions" are legal bribes.
The extent of the pension bribes problem can be seen in the scale of EU payments to UK politicians (who of course all became strong remain supporters):
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/international-news/europe...
"Democracy is the worst form of government - except for all the others that have been tried". I would suggest the same holds for most of the variations, no system will keep all the people happy (or be perfect).
Personally I am prefer the grander bargains of democracy; transparency (vs back room deals), rule of law (vs corruption), and accountability (vs protection by / for the party). I also would prefer rationality over tribalism, but I suspect that might be too much to ask of humanity.
"Look at Brexit, it has caused economic harm to the UK, and this has caused support for it to drop"
Economic harm?! The impact of Brexit, if any exists at all, is unmeasurable because it's lost in the noise compared to lockdowns and trying to fight COVID.
What we can say for sure is that the people who claimed voting to leave would trigger an immediate recession were wrong. The economy grew in the years after the vote. Actual implementation was largely put on hold just months after leaving due to COVID and little has changed since.
My point is that both systems are fallible and susceptible to both group influence (think peer pressure or the less charitable group think) and the influence of special interests; both good and bad.
As to economic harm, it is measurable and has been measured; even the Bank of England says that the UK will suffer more than other G7 and EU nations due to the current supply side inflation. The World Bank, the IMF, and many maket research firms have said very similar things based on economic data (FDI, trade flows, GDP, etc). If you want to eat a jam doughnut with extra cream and sprinkles, great, own it. Just don't be surprised if someone mentions that it isn't as good for you as a stick of celery. Sticking your fingers in your ears so that you don't need to listen to people telling you otherwise doesn't mean a doughnut is a stick of celery.
People get confused about this because her predecessor Juncker supposedly got the job for this reason; in reality this was a ploy by well-connected EU insiders to make Juncker specifically President, and this rule has not been applied previously or since and likely wouldn't have been if some other party bloc backing some other candidate won instead.
"you lament that EU commissioners are voted in by party blocs in the EU parliament"
Where did I say that? I said the opposite, right? That in theory they are appointed directly by national governments without EU parliament or Commission involvement (in theory, but apparently not in practice). EU Parliament can only fire the entire Commission at once, it doesn't select Commissioners and never has.
"you say that people vote for parties in the UK (they don't they vote for MPs, regardless of their party affiliation is written on the ballot), and that this is good"
No, because I didn't express any view on whether it's good or not, I described how the system works. Why do you keep putting words in my mouth like that?
"even the Bank of England says that the UK will suffer more than other G7 and EU nations due to the current supply side inflation"
Bank of England, IMF etc said a lot of stuff that turned out to be flat wrong about Brexit in the past. None of these institutions has any credibility. Every single one wanted Brexit not to happen for ideological reasons and created "expert" forecasts on that basis. A former BoE chief even said the entire profession of economics was in crisis, their prediction misses were so bad, and he's right.
At any rate, the more important point is that, again, trying to tease apart inflation due to fighting COVID from inflation due to Brexit is now hopeless. I'm not happy about that. I feel like COVID was a massive distraction and has largely prevented the government capitalizing on Brexit, and it also means we'll never be able to resolve this economic impact debate. The cost of lockdowns, mass testing, travel restrictions etc is so massive that Brexit is a mosquito in comparison.
"Sticking your fingers in your ears so that you don't need to listen to people telling you otherwise doesn't mean a doughnut is a stick of celery"
The people in question aren't neutral bystanders, they very much want certain outcomes (for ideological reasons). Brexit is neither a donut nor celery, it's merely a continuation of the long term trend towards decentralized governance - look at a graph of how many countries exist over time to see this. In such a way it can work out better or worse depending very much on your perspective and values.
Yeah but no. I guess there's an electorate, as much as there's active components in homeopathic snake oil.
> I think it is more related to what powers they can exercise.
Nothing of that changes the statement that Mrs., err, von der Leyen is not directly voted by citizens. The word mongering is immaterial to the metacommentary on power structures. Which you acknowledge and leave pretty much unspecified. If I understand the top comment correctly, there is fear of corruption or whatever, and it's simply disengineous to blame that on the electorate.
As a point of reference, Fukuyama (end of history, etc.) outlines how corruption is a normal tendency en route to regulated democracies. In this view, where local patriotism and consequent nepotism are concerned, it sounds to me very much like the electorate shares in the blame, and that the organized societies on the next level, the model democracies, must have grown out of this.
I rather doubt that this is the case. Sure, the aristratic family name may be a statistical fluke, especially where family names pass through paternal lineages. It is nevertheless part of the bigger picture.
TL;DR: Yeah comissioners to the parliament are voted but no they aren't. This is not debatable.
Does it feel like history ended in the 90s? Seems like the past few years had decades worth of history to offer...