Which of those two leaders were elected by the people?
- Elections are so rare (every 5 years) and encompass so many huge life-altering choices (VDL being one of the criteria only) that it's not democratic. The Swiss vote every important law, like "Should we buy fighter jets".
- De facto, party health is part of democracy (look at the Rwanda: It is absolutely possible to have a genocide made by democracies, and it is in fact more frequent than dictatorships) and network effects have made that European parties don't represent the people's will,
- Europe dispatches money to countries that need convincing, like Scottland, while wearing the mature members' citizen to the bone. We can't even have decent roads or internet here, while newcomers are super-happy to join ("I'm happy because Europe brought wealth and economic development!!!" - yeah look in 20 years). Money flushing around Europe trying to bribe citizens groups into staying, which makes opposition impossible. The EU is too chicken to let citizen vote every 20 years on whether we should stay in Europe, because then answer would be a big NO.
- The kill switch didn't even work, countries can't leave, or there is retaliation. Not only UK but France voted against the new treaties in 2005, the president still signed them.
The EU is the most lazy level of democracy. It's a knee-jerk reaction to say that VDL can be removed from office by the citizen.
Well us Brits tried that experiment and it isn't seen as a success.
What is not a success is:
- The EU taking retaliation against them,
- The EU parties overturning members of the Leave party into the Libdem, AFTER being elected (yes, it happened for 16 members, plus the ones who didn't officially switch but stalled the Leave party's proceedings),
- From the moment they clearly voted NO, it took 3 more votes until they could be allowed to leave. Basically, it was until it was clear the UK citizenry would be entirely blocking the democratic process until the EU-Leave decision was enacted. You can understand people's despair of democracy when a clear LEAVE vote isn't enacted, like in France 2005.
In the rest of the EU, they're too chicken to let us vote. But they will let us vote... one day... only in areas where they're guaranteed a large STAY result.
The EU is only letting us vote when the answer is Yes.
Taking several votes for such a big decision is good. It prevents impulsive hotheadedness from making a ruinous decision. The UK did vote to leave and then left.
And it ruined the UK. That's why other people are saying it was a bad idea. Not because they didn't vote, but because the thing they voted for ruined them.
Except the catchphrase of the day was "Brexit means Brexit", because no one bothered to define what we were voting for until we'll after the fact. There were plenty of options such as a soft Brexit or a hard Brexit. Even the hard Brexit kept us in some institutions so what we got was harder than the hardest Brexit discussed.
So in what way did we get what we voted for?
Rwanda has never been a democracy. Habyarimana was "elected" with 99% of the votes ffs.
> and it is in fact more frequent than dictatorships
It is trivially easy to verify that this is not true.
Rwanda came for help to France 2 years before, and France conditionned its financial help to a democratisation process.
- From here, about 150 parties got born.
- The previous dictatorship, even of the majority, was protecting the minority, because they knew the international consequence on countries who don't protect the minorities.
- Once a democracy, it was a leadership of the majority ethnicity (90% Hutu) so you bet they had no qualms about protecting the Tutsis. Tensions and invitation to violence soared immediately, but in a coveted speech.
- A plane containing half the government was bombed, the country woke up without clear leadership, elections didn't happen fast enough. Citizen acted with their own machetes.
Democracy means the majority owns the decisions. Doesn't mean they'll be good people.
I suggest you show up for next EU election if you don't like the option.
It is worth remembering at this point how von der Leyen first became Commission President. She was controversially nominated by the European Council - who are not directly elected representatives within the EU system - deviating from the spitzenkandidat convention in a way that surprised and angered many MEPs - who are. Her own national government (Germany) did not support her in the Council voting because one of the parties in the governing coalition opposed her. She was eventually confirmed by a narrow majority in a secret ballot of the European Parliament from which little can therefore be determined about who did or didn't vote for her except that quite a lot of MEPs who were expected to support her candidacy based on public statements did not in fact do so in the secret vote.
So she was essentially proposed by a group of people who aren't directly elected at EU level and in some cases aren't even directly elected by the nations they represent - in violation of the normal convention expected by the only people who are directly elected at EU level - and was then narrowly confirmed by that directly elected group only in a secret ballot from which the vote of each individual representative was not recorded and there is therefore no possibility for their own electorates to hold those representatives to account personally for how they voted. Given that we are talking about the most influential political post in the EU this is not exactly a powerful demonstration of democratic legitimacy and a clear popular mandate no matter how you look at it.
Still, calling the system undemocratic is a stretch since anyone who pays attention can see how EU policies have shifted after the far right increased the number of their seats in the previous election. Climate ambition has been dialed way down and immigration is being curtailed.
Everything else she does needs to be confirmed by representatives of your own member state.
Just like EVERY OTHER democracy.
Not really.
In most representative democracies it is the elected representatives who initiate new law. In the EU the elected MEPs have no power to do this and it is the role of the unelected Commission to start the process.
Meanwhile the Commission is also the "executive branch" of the EU. A great deal of what the commissioners do is not directly subject to approval by the European Parliament.
The Council is the one that generally consists of the leaders of each member state. It has important roles in the system including selecting candidates for key roles and as part of "trilogue" negotiations (which are themselves sometimes controversial for being secretive and unaccountable) but has little formal participation in the normal legislative process.
The Parliament is the one whose members are elected by the citizens of the EU. Its best known role is to debate and vote on new legislation.
The Commission holds much of the real power as it serves as both the leadership of the executive branch and the origin of new legislative proposals - and yet its members are chosen via much less transparent means and have little personal accountability to EU citizens.
Many EU commissioners have been politicians whose national political careers were struggling and - like appointment to the House of Lords here in the UK - they may have been put forward for the Commission by their national political leadership as a position of influence that required less confirmation than winning a popular vote. This is relevant here because von der Leyen herself is arguably in this category.
The next election is in 2029. I suggest you show up instead of spreading fabrications online.
That’s democracy in its purest form.
I live in the UK, on paper we have an absolutely terrible version of democracy. No constitution, and un elected head of state. Compared to pre pull out Afghanistan it sucks. And yet we are still here. Perfect on paper democracy isn't the be all and end all. It's about institutional culture. The EU has a much better democratic culture than the US does.