Show me another place where 27 countries live peacefully together and jointly govern an entire sub continent, by collaborating together and discussing publicly about their political proposals.
Of course it has its problems, of course it takes a lot of effort to bring 27 countries together on a subject, of course there will be controversial opinions among its members, depending on the POV (a lot more people in EU agree with the chat control proposal than those who disagree), but that's the price of democracy.
Switzerland is very democratic. People get to vote on individual laws, instead of having 3 different layers of abstraction between who you vote for and what laws are passed.
The price is having to make compromises every day.
It means putting together and listening to the people who say "immigration must be stopped" and "countries should have no borders" and everything in between, but no side tries to silent the others using violence.
What you're talking about is the tyranny of the majority, which is not democratic and is not categorized as democracy, in a democracy the effect of the majority taking it all is moderated by a carefully balanced separation of powers.
For example in a democracy the justice system is usually independent from the government.
> Not having privacy is a consequence of authoritarianism, be it for a greater good (to find child abusers) or not (to find dissidents).
But we have privacy in Europe, unlike most places in the World.
Blindly repeating that EU is authoritarian doesn't make it true.
Yes, Europe is big, but those "dramatic decisions" need to be ratified by your "local" government, that it's probably more distant than the EU commission.
At least in the EU commission they do their job, which is to write proposals, local governments lately have only been preoccupied by their own chairs.
And it's basically the only place where "dramatic decisions" can be discussed right now in Europe.
I would love that my National government focused on "privacy" and "E2E encryption" and sparkled a discussion about those topics in the parliament, instead of doing this:
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/italy-migrant-deaths-mini...