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rvnx

There were elections about a week ago, so people voted for that, did they change mind in a week ?

If you go against what people voted for, isn't it denying democracy and the votes of the people ?

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The EU Council is not the same as the EU parliament.

>If you go against what people voted for, isn't it denying democracy and the votes of the people ?

No. An explicit feature of a representative democracy is that the will of the majority can be ignored.

The EU isn't a direct democracy where people can vote on particular issues, they vote on national parties, which send representatives to create EU wide parties.

Yes, some of the parties did. In Sweden for example, the government parties just decided to greenlight the EU proposal that is up for vote now, even though their EU parliament representatives (from the same parties) had said before the recent EU election that they were against it (they even celebrated publicly last autumn when the proposal was downvoted last time). It's a mess trying to keep track of the party politics to be fair and it's possible the EU parliament members are voting in one way while their "mother party" in the home land votes in another way. But it did feel like a rug pull here.

I guarantee you the number of people who voted in the EU elections thinking of this is negligible

And also the council has its own legitimacy which is not dependent on the EU elections, if the EP voted on this as a lame duck you'd have a point, but that doesn't seem to be happening

Most people are just concerned about economic and social issues, and the implications this proposal has on freedom of speech and what that means to democracy seems to be unknown to most. In Portugal, this proposal was not debated nor was it present on most parties' electoral agendas. Furthermore, I got no replies from the MEP candidates I emailed about their opinion on chatcontrol. Even if I wanted to vote accordingly to this proposal, I simply couldn't.

this specific proposal had the benefit of already having had votes on it, so you could've probably found the parties' voting records there. But yeah, there's a broader issue with how european politics is approached since it is always so nationalized that these kind of votes end up as referendums on the national government, which in turn breeds ignorance of what the EU is responsible for and for what it isn't which feeds the vicious cycle of apathy

I'm mildly optimistic it'll get better since the EU and EU politicians are getting more visible. I just hope we don't overshoot and end up where the US is right now where people seem to think the president does everything at all times at all levels

Btw, I'm assuming you meant "MEP candidate" when you say "deputy candidate", in english as far as I can tell deputy lost the meaning of "legislature member" in common use, that remained common in Latin languages (italian here, we use the same term)

Just an FYI that it might confuse some people (like it did with me before I switched to thinking about it in italian) why you were asking the deputies of a candidate instead of the candidates themselves

Fixed deputy -> MEP. Thanks!

Voted and changed their mind for what though? What has this proposal to do with what people voted for? Most people have no clue this is going on; it wasn't in any party program 'for the layman' that said

[x] 'privacy invasive scanning of everything personal, BUT for the benefit of the children and Kutcher'

Most people (even tech people) didn't/don't know about this and also, most people really don't care in the face of other more urgent things (housing, immigration, climate, inflation, etc etc etc).

If you sit down with them and explain (something like: what if this happens and you agree to the scanning, 20 years from now Putin invades your country and you get dragged off the gulag on day #1 because 17 years ago you sent a derogatory image of him to someone; they said they would delete everything!?!), most would probably vote against, but no-one is doing that.

The elections were not for the EU Council, which represents the governments of the member states.

People voted for the EU Parliament, which has a far more negative attitude to this proposal.

It is good that you are getting to understand how 'democracy' works.

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