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Comment by LaurensBER | Hacker News Reader

I have many concerns about the rise of populism in Europe but the (few/very few) good things that might come out of this is that there will finally be (enough?) pressure on the EU to reform.

Despite all their talk about being pro human-rights and pro democracy in practice the voter turnout percentages for the EU elections are extremely low. As an EU citizen I almost never meet someone who's interested or who feel represented by the EU. There's, no doubt, several reasons for it but the biggest one might be that an additional abstraction layer that's cultural too far away from the average voter.

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It’s more likely that the rise of the populist right (or left, like Melenchon) will lead to the destruction of the EU. They do not want reform, they want to go back to the fifties.

This is a real risk but from the embers of the (current) systems a better one could still rise.

Despite all the big talk from the likes of Wilders and Meloni, the moment that they're in government they do seem to be very willing to cooperate with their European peers.

EU and EC have been made as a resistant to populism by design, the end result is that we citizens can't change anything, and decisions are arbitrarily made behind closed doors.

The amount of layers between your vote, and the elected official that matters is just too big to have any form of accountability, especially when you couple it with national issues.

I'm frankly less concerned about populism, but more concerned about sheer disregard of opinions of citizens.

Not that they don't disregard some of my opinions too, but I am quite worried about the opinions of some of the other citizens.

The worst thing might be that it is kind (or close to) a best possible average (can't assess honestly). When I talk with many (mostly opinionated) people, at various ends of various positions (left, right, ecology, industry, security, etc.) I can't imagine any leadership that would make a significant portion of the EU citizens happy.

Now, the historical solution was to make things so worse to calm down all the crazy ideas (mostly implying war or revolution) and make people focus on the basics, let's see how it goes around this time.

Or maybe it's impossible to satisfy desires of such culturally diverse populace as EU citizens.

Which makes current model, and federated model impossible and/or prone to crumbling. Problems of Germany are different than one Spain faces, and France, and Poland etc.

Which why originally much more was decided by consensus and if there is no consensus then simply every country can do their own way. I feel like a lot of things actually reached a local optimum in the 90s in our approach to improve things, we left that.

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