She is no less democratically elected than the prime minister of a parliamentary republic... They get appointed by the democratically elected parliament.
The European Council does nominate the candidate and infamously in 2019 overrode the informally agreed on spitzenkandidaten process, by which the nominee of the political group (EU Parliament equivalent of parties) with the most seats should have gotten the nomination.
That said, the EU Parliament is not bound by the nomination. It can very obviously reject any candidate it doesn't like, though of course the dynamics of candidate selection are heavily influenced by the European Council's nomination power.
But yes, there's nothing per se undemocratic about it and I'm a bit bewildered by people asking for direct election of the President rather than cleaning up the existing process, given that most EU member states elect their heads of government indirectly.
1. The majority of representatives in Bundestag represents (up to rounding issues) the majority of voters.
2. Parties advertise their chancellor candidate before the election, and voters take that into account when choosing which party to vote for.
Being chosen democratically isn't a black and white thing. It becomes gradually less democratic as you separate voter intent and outcome further. This isn't just a function of how the election process itself works, but also voters being informed.
Practically no voter would have predicted von der Leyen becoming commission president when they cast their vote, making her appointment not very democratic.
It does not matter who elects the EU commission, there needs to be a popular vote across the EU for every commissioner job and the EU Commission head. What we have today in EU is pure BS: every country gets a commissioner based on that country's influence within the bloc and every time a new country joins the EU, a new commissioner role just happens to be created.
I want to be able to choose from a number of candidates who should run the EU, not the prime minister or the president of a member country.
Everybody who holds even a little power in the EU construct needs to be voted by EU citizens, not appointed by who knows who.
This second- or third-hand "democracy" is not a democracy at all.
Your talking points are misinformed and pretty ridiculous which makes me think you're a troll rather than having a faithful argument. But on the off chance you are trying to have a real discussion: The Council and Parliament both get elected and the commission cannot do anything without them, so it's not like the system is not democratic.
I don't see the US asking for their attorney general or supreme court justices to be democratically elected. At some point you have to trust that the people you actually elect will appoint people who know what they're doing.
Just because there's someone in the chain you're not doing a round of elections on doesn't make the system bad. You need the system to have agency at some point.
No, I really believe everybody with a shred of power in an office needs to be elected, especially at the EU level where their decisions can affect hundreds of millions. Again, second- or third-hand democracy is not really democracy.
> I don't see the US asking for their attorney general or supreme court justices to be democratically elected. At some point you have to trust that the people you actually elect will appoint people who know what they're doing.
Well, maybe they should. And should also limit their mandates from life to maybe 4-8 years. And no, it does not mean that if I vote for someone I will trust that someone completely. They will, at some point, take some decisions that are contrary to my interest but in their own political interest. So they do not really have a desire to represent me fully, just enough.
> Just because there's someone in the chain you're not doing a round of elections on doesn't make the system bad. You need the system to have agency at some point.
No, they need to be voted in. This is how we get in situations where unelected officials, like the EU commission is, make decisions that affect my life without any consequences for them.
The system needs to be tied to the people's wish at every corner, and if the people don't like someone, they should be able to vote them out on a recall vote just as easy as ordering pizza.
I would like to see a system where confidence votes are cast every six months or so for everyone (parliament, president, prime-minister - you name it). And if they fail, they get booted out the next day and fresh elections are held in the next two-three weeks. And the cycle repeats. Either they work for the people to keep their jobs or not. Super simple.
I know it sounds like the commission is full of buddy-buddy jobs but, living in Brussels and seeing the bubble from up close I can tell you that is seldom the case. I can’t say it never happens but the processes and scrutiny these people go through is extremely high.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s often a lot of incompetence that ends up at the helm. But this isn’t something elections solve. Elections turned the leader of the free world into the leader of incompetence.
Adding elections adds democracy, it does not add expertise. If your issue is with bad decisions being made, your issue is not with how the people got in the position to make those decisions, it’s with the systems that allowed bad decisions to be made.
A bad plane pilot can crash your plane and kill you; the fix isn’t to elect your pilots.
The solution is potentially as simple as that and still they prefer not to have actual properly-democratic elections.
But you’re correct in that it doesn’t need vibe coding or any other kind of solutions because the president of Europe is not and will not ever be democratically elected, so such potential solutions are moot.
The US (electoral collage and 2 senator seats per state) and the UK (government ministers don't need to be MPs) also fail at this definition, and I would like them to be better in general too.
Get this Brexit-era disinfo off my screen...
> She is no less democratically elected than the prime minister of a parliamentary republic
Well I would say this is arguable. Sure, her power is ultimately resulting from a popular mandate. But, if your country elects the head of state directly (say, France) then there are two "hops" between a popular mandate and the head of the EC. Whereas, if you are in a parliamentary system, it's three "hops" (MPs -> head of State -> EC president).
She has never been part of any democratic process to put her in that role. In a parliamentary democracy the prime minister is an elected minister who leads his or her party. Von der leyen is a technocrat. “Demos” means “the people” en masse.