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>And then in a completely democratic mannner, Europeans said "that's who we want leading us".

No, it wasn't. She was chosen by a group of country leaders during a closed doors voting.

If it's democratic at all, it's very tangential.

I've taken that comment to be very sarcastic, but maybe it wasn't.

There's an election in the chain. Voters elected the national MPs who then selected the national PMs, who then selected von den Leyen. Democratic-ish.

After how many levels detached from the general population, does the vote stop being democratic?

It doesn’t stop being democratic. It’s just a scale from more to less democratic. America’s founding fathers were skeptical of democracy, so they provided for the president to be elected by the Electoral College, which was originally appointed by state legislatures. It’s still “democratic”—just less so than a direct election.

American people went to the polls to vote(or not) for Trump, Europeans didn't go to the polls to vote for Cenzura. Kind of a big difference on the democracy scale.

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