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Comment by belter | Hacker News Reader

I had it with these people. The next time there are elections for the Commission I will...hey...wait a minute!...

Well, the Commission is elected by the elected governments of the member states. In a similar fashion, many heads of state are voted in by the elected government and not directly. Both procedures can be seen as iffy, but for the EU this was a deliberate compromise to get potential members on board.

Your comment ignores the well known fact, that within party factions, election for the golden salaries of Brussels and the European parliament are a compensation mechanism. For the losers within the power plays of internal Party politics in Europe. The winners run the Government and run Ministries. The losers are sent to Brussels.

> Well, the Commission is elected by the elected governments of the member states.

Nope.

Commissioners are appointed by the member governments. Each government has an allocation of commissioners to appoint. They are usually failed politicians of the party of government (all political careers end in failure). They have to be signed off by the EU parliament (I think), but nobody in Europe knows the background of every political has-been in other EU countries.

I believe that the EU Council (elected heads of state) gets to appoint the EU Commission President, with an approval required from the Parliament. The remaining 26 Commissioners are selected by the Council of Ministers (appointed ministers for each EU member state, and hence an additional layer of indirection away from the actual electorate.) Then Parliament has some substantially more limited ability to review these appointments, but I don't think they get an outright veto.

The European Parliament does get an outright veto or rather the opposite, without explicit approval from the EP commissioners can‘t be appointed.

The catch, they can only approve (or not approve) them as a group. Usually the parliament will indicate which nominated members they find unacceptable and those respective countries nominate new candidates.

Reference: https://www.europeactive.eu/news/european-parliament-gearing...

Arguably this is more democratic than how we appoint government ministers in Germany. The chancellor gets elected by parliament and then appoints (and fires) ministers on their own authority without any check by parliament.

> The catch, they can only approve (or not approve) them as a group.

OK, that's what I thought, but I had doubts, because I read something contrary recently. Thanks for clarifying.

Can German chancellors appoint anyone they like as ministers, or do they have to appoint someone who has been elected to the Bundestag? Because commissioners are not elected.

So, as I recall, there's been exactly one instance in which the EU Parliament has rejected all the Commissioners; they sacked the lot, because it was evident that they were mostly corrupt. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

> Can German chancellors appoint anyone they like as ministers, or do they have to appoint someone who has been elected to the Bundestag?

They can appoint anyone to ver the age of 18 with German citizenship. It‘s common that several ministers are not members of the Bundestag.

In fact, the chancellor doesn‘t even have to be a member of the Bundestag. Though he obviously gets elected by the whole parliament.

> selected by the Council of Ministers

I don't think that's right, is it? Apart from anything else, the Council of Ministers isn't a fixed group of people; if the meeting is about fisheries, then it's the fisheries ministers from the member governments, and so on. Each meeting of the Council of Ministers is a different group of people. And anyway, they can't select anyone they like, because each member country gets an allocation of commissioners (one or two, I think).

I believe there are plans afoot to remove that rule, so that countries like Liechtenstein no longer get one commissioner. About time too.

This is what the Wikipedia article says. The EU itself has a series of websites that describe the various EU institutions and their selection processes, but they are much less descriptive about the appointment process.

Which is to say: in your next national elections (Dutch ones are in two weeks!), vote for someone who'll use their influence to get a Commission you approve of.

Or even better, vote for someone who will dismantle this nominally democratic system and implement something better. We can do better.

https://www.eda.admin.ch/aboutswitzerland/en/home/politik-ge...

And in the EU parliament elections.

That's hilarious

This is never a talking point because it's so detached from normal people life and it's actionable - it's not a good empty promise they can taper cities with and then never fulfill.

The ideal empty promise is something that will take more than 5y to evaluate and people care about.

The Commission President has a de facto (not de jure) veto power over who the member states nominate so in reality the Commission is selected by its President.

The President is in theory selected by the Council (leaders of the member states), but in practice the whole process is secret so nobody knows how it happens. Certainly the Commission often ends up with extremely dubious Presidents where nobody can explain on what merits they gained that position.

And then the selection of both President and Commissioners is supposed to be ratified by the Parliament but last time they were given a vote with a single option on it. You could either support vdL or abstain. And it's not a real Parliament anyway so nobody with any political ambition actually runs for it, it's a joke chamber made up of yes-men and people who think their countries should leave the EU entirely. Even Juncker didn't take it seriously.

So nothing about the Commission relies on elections.

It is one thing to have that structure and hold to it, it is another matter to hold sham elections to select possible candidates and then pick people that weren't even on the list. Every time I hear of it it seems to go out of its way to shit on the very core concepts of democracy, maybe not because it is that way by design, but simply because it can.

Ahhhh yes. A fun case study in how democracy can devolve into byzantine bureaucracy.

EU was designed to be run by technocrats and, as much as possible, totally insulated from any kind of democracy. There's no "devolution" going on here.

A technocratic government might produce good outcomes sometimes, but the main problem here is that the "technocrats" seem to be relatively inexperienced with information technology.

The 'techno' prefix in 'technocrat' does not refer to information technology, or even science. It instead refers to a technical specialist in the exercising of governmental or managerial authority.

I can't think of a single instance in which a technocracy has produced a good outcome.

The proposed European Constitution went a long way to fix this, but was unfortunately rejected in French and Dutch referendums.

The people didn't want the EU to reform.

>The proposed European Constitution went a long way to fix this

Uhh... what?

Firstly, it was rejected by more than just the French and the Dutch. Secondly, the reason it was rejected is precisely because, for lack of democratic process, it structurally favors this kind of authoritarian opacity.

The proposed constitution doesn't even begin to fix this; it is instead the very cause.

The Constitution was implemented anyway after it was rejected by voters, by passing an endless series of "amendments" to the existing treaties, a mechanism chosen specifically to give national governments an excuse to not do the referendums that their constitutions required.

where do you live? And can you vote directly for your government?

Most people don't get to vote directly for their government. They vote for a local representative, or MP.

In the EU, most countries don't even have a government party, because most governments are coalitions, which may not have even existed before the elections.

So you don't even get to vote for the party of government, nor its leader. It's all very indirect.

It's simple! You just vote for someone who then votes for the person who decides who will vote for the person that is the European president.

It's like democracy except so indirect that it's total shit.

Can't trust the people to actually choose who to put in charge - have to leave that decision to the leaders selected by the other leaders who were voted by the other leaders.

> I had it with these people.

You've had it with the EU bureaucrats? What a shame, CSAM has been detected on your phone. Prepare to be apprehended.

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