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Comment by eigenket | Hacker News Reader

Saying "the EU" is wildly oversimplific. A more accurate interpretation (in my opinion) is one particularly stupid EU comissioner (Ylva Johansson, Commissioner for Home Affairs) who is pushing things way beyond her remit.

The EU has mechanisms which can deal with this sort of nonsense, however. The comissioners can't pass laws themselves, only propose them. The EU parliament has to actually vote the law proposed by the commission into law and it seems unlikely for this one to pass.

The EU parliament is directly elected by normal people, and is generally rather more in touch with reality than the commissioners are.

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I wish we citizens of countries in the EU would stop bending over backward to apologize and explain away these undemocratic institutions. "Oh but don't worry those unelected officials can't pass laws, just propose them." "Oh but actually this other body is directly elected unlike these other folks." "Oh it's actually democratic because we voted those other folks in who elected them in."

Like c'mon folks. It sucks. It's really bad. We should do something about it and stop falling all over ourselves to explain how it's not that bad. You don't think the actual lawmakers are listening to their advice? Of course they are. They elected those proposers.

This weird defense we keep rallying to is tiresome. It's ok to criticize the EU. It's really not a paradise in any sense of the word and many, many of its constituent countries look far less democratic than the US.

The european commission is elected, just indirectly. It is proposed by the european council, and the european parliement says yes or no.

Saying that indirect elections are undemocratic is like saying Switzerland is not a "liberal democracy" because its federal council is elected by the federal assembly instead by direct popular vote.

That's a terrible argument and one that gets trotted out every time. We can do better than this. We should.

The CPC governing bodies are indirectly elected too, by members of the Party, of which most anyone can join. That doesn't make it democratic.

Let's not play fast and loose with democracy here. We deserve, and should agitate for, more representative democracies else we slide slowly toward the very tyrannies we oppose.

I think you and I mostly agree here.

My point is that the EU commission is bad, its a shitty system that doesn't work well and needs to be reformed. Pointing at the EU as a whole and saying things like "The EU was caught..." lets the commission (and this commissioner) off the hook.

If we clearly say that the EU parliament works pretty well, and the commission doesn't then its obvious what needs reforming. If you just point at the EU as a whole then the problem looks impossible.

By the way I am no longer a citizen of a country in the EU, I'm from the UK (although I happen to live in the EU currently).

> The comissioners can't pass laws themselves, only propose them.

Then what's the point of them?

They are indirectly elected so that they can submit proposals that would normally be political suicide.

> who is pushing things way beyond her remit

I completely disagree. She is working exactly how the system is designed.

Europe needs to replace the commission with a democratically elected body. One that is elected in a different way to the parliament to get a different cross section of the population.

However as someone in the UK we have the exact same situation with the House of Lords.

"who is pushing things way beyond her remit."

And who was almost successful in doing so. She still may be successful a year or two from now.

It is as if the EC was a big carousel of special interests where every commissioner takes his/her turn and others help them pass things, on order to be able to pass their own things later.

A classical oligarchy, the ancient Greeks would immediately recognize the problem.

You're right, I wish I could still edit the comment to clarify it.

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