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Comment by synotna | Hacker News Reader

She was proposed by the European Council (made up of more or less democratically elected heads of state/government) and approved by the European Parliament (democratically elected representatives)

That is as "elected" as many heads of government i.e. any prime minister system

Directly electing presidents doesn't necessarily lead to better outcomes

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There were candidates nominated for the election and she wasn't of of them. Actually Manfred Weber was the elected candidate, but Merkel made sure that he did not get the job. The whole election was a farce and calling this democratic is quite a bold claim.

Merkel was elected though, was she not?

How is that not indirectly democratic then?

Sorry, but that is laughable. If there was a presidential election in the US with two candidates, and after the election the governor of California installed Weird Al Yankovic instead of the elected candidate as the new presdient, would you call it democratic simply because the governor of California was elected?

If in the US instead of a president, all you could elect was party functionaries to an institution with the explicit purpose of being between the voters and the decision and they then voted somebody in as president against the popular vote, would you call that democratic?

Because that's what happened in 2016 and many times before that.

Glass House, stones, etc.

Actually, Merkel was not elected by the poulace but rather her party was. You see, it's layers all the way down and with each layer democracy gets thinner and the opportunities for corruption get bigger.

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