European here.
The EU is not Europe (although the EU often conflates the two).
No citizen ever voted for any of the commissioners that come up with these regulations.
The EU is not Europe (although the EU often conflates the two).
No citizen ever voted for any of the commissioners that come up with these regulations.
I for one like my society not being a wild wild west run by big corps.
We vote for the EU parliament representatives and they recommend commissioners to the council and the council appoints. A bit like the UK, where they don't elect a prime minister but vote for parties which appoint the prime minister. Notice how UK went through a couple prime ministers without an election?
If you want to shoot for technicalities, in the USA people don't vote for the president but electoral college that happens to elect a specific person but they might choose not to.
How do we depose a bad EU commissioner?
Anyway if somehow the EU commissioner manages to be bad and needs to be removed ASAP the EU parliament, which is made of the directly elected officials, can remove the commissioner.
EU is undemocratic and the members can't do anything about EU is a myth like Brexit is removing the red tape myth.
EU is not a 3rd party institution, despite that politicians might talk as if it is. They might say something like "Ah we would love to do that but we can't because of the rules in Brussels" to deflect blame but Brussels is simply the location where people who you voted for and people appointed by the people you voted for gather to agree on these rules.
That's why EU often can't agree on something if even one of the countries(which is a placeholder for the people who they voted for or people who are appointed by the people they voted for) don't want. The most recent and well known examples are the policies against the war in Ukraine where Hungary didn't play ball.
That's also why UK won't be able to be a better place after Brexit: The EU rules are also British rules, made by British politicians with UK's best interest in mind. The most you can get is sewage on the beaches and border checks when exporting to EU. The border check part is about making sure that if you happen to remove regulations and start producing things like children toys with led paint, these toys won't end in Barcelona or Warsaw.
I’ll grant you that due to the generally low turn out for EU parliamentary elections, the commission’s mandate could be argued to be lacking.
Otherwise this is just a nonsense argument.
So what?
Nobody ever voted for any US president too, if that's your concern.
Besides, commission is formed by delegates one for each country and they are not bound to the political institutions of their country exactly to ensure independence from local politics.
They represent the interest of the EU.
Approval of legislation proposals presented by the commission is the duty of the EU Parliament, which is made by professional politicians elected in each EU country in proportion of the population.
Each approved legislation has to be then ratified by the single Parliaments of each country, in accordance with their laws.
There is absolutely no lack of representation in EU, believe me!
Don't be that person, learn how the institutions of EU work before writing a random populist good-for-nothing comment (which seems to be a very popular sport Europeans like to play here on HN when talking about EU, for reasons I don't fully comprehend).
And I watched the Copyright Directive vote in the EP - basically the Commission just repeatedly rammed the bad legislation through Parliament until they got the “yes” vote they were looking for. When massive (historically large) public petitions emerged against one of the articles of the legislation, the EU literally just changed its article number (to “rebrand” and dissociate the same legislation from the backlash) and then they pushed it back through Parliament again
meaning?
In what way what you observed is relevant to the discussion?
How can we be sure that you understood what you observed?
because you say so?
> And I watched the Copyright Directive vote in the EP - basically the Commission just repeatedly rammed the bad legislation through Parliament until they got the “yes”
Boris Johnson, is that you?
MEPs are elected by the people of EU (up until not long ago also by the Country that left, and they associated by political family, not by Country of provenance)
So now you don't like that either?
How did the commission obtained this "yes" if the elected representatives where not in favour of it?
please explain.
You are not making any sense.
> When massive (historically large) public petitions emerged against
please, provide evidence of these large massive (meaning hundreds of thousands of petitioners at least, there are 450 million people in EU) petitions (plural) against it.
> the EU literally just changed its article number (to “rebrand” and dissociate the same legislation from the backlash)
Are you saying that MEPs are all stupid and can't recognize the same article by just swapping its number?
An who rebranded it?
The EU at large?
the 28 countries? (I mean 29, UK was still in, but I guess they are not responsible of what EU has done while they were a member, am I right?)
the Parliament?
the commission?
who exactly?
An why?
Whose interests this gray entity was serving exactly?