Since then the EU is mostly developing in a wrong direction.
The EU Parliament is directly elected. The EU Council is comprised of EU country head of states, which are all directly elected. The EU Council and EU Parliament then elect the EU Comission.
Sounds democratic to me.
The powerful EU Commission being appointed by governments (and again only approved by the Parliament) is a form of executive federalism. This makes the chain of legitimacy longer and longer which is hardly positive for democracy.
The commission is elected by the parliament. This is democratic.
Would it be an improvement if parliament could propose laws and commission members. Maybe. But saying that this makes the EU undemocratic is unreasonable.
It is more of a bureaucratic technocracy with democratic fig leaves. People often attribute competence to technocracies, but that is an illusion.
Also I don't believe you can move up government function to layers above your national government and still call it representative.
In reality the culture and circumstances of parliament members is too far removed from the voters. I also cannot know the other representatives, so my voting decision will always be restricted to a shallow popularity contest. But as explained, this doesn't matter, because the elected representatives cannot implement any agenda.
That’s an odd thing to say when there is a real chance of the commission failing a confidence vote this week. We might end up with a new commission due to the conservatives colluding with the far right to abandon the climate agenda entirely.
This is a very concrete consequence of the voters electing right-wing parliamentarians.
But you said yourself, that there are different lavels of directness. That is the core argument where everyone has different expectations.