Hacker News Reader

Comment by arlort | Hacker News Reader

I guarantee you the number of people who voted in the EU elections thinking of this is negligible

And also the council has its own legitimacy which is not dependent on the EU elections, if the EP voted on this as a lame duck you'd have a point, but that doesn't seem to be happening

View on HN

Most people are just concerned about economic and social issues, and the implications this proposal has on freedom of speech and what that means to democracy seems to be unknown to most. In Portugal, this proposal was not debated nor was it present on most parties' electoral agendas. Furthermore, I got no replies from the MEP candidates I emailed about their opinion on chatcontrol. Even if I wanted to vote accordingly to this proposal, I simply couldn't.

this specific proposal had the benefit of already having had votes on it, so you could've probably found the parties' voting records there. But yeah, there's a broader issue with how european politics is approached since it is always so nationalized that these kind of votes end up as referendums on the national government, which in turn breeds ignorance of what the EU is responsible for and for what it isn't which feeds the vicious cycle of apathy

I'm mildly optimistic it'll get better since the EU and EU politicians are getting more visible. I just hope we don't overshoot and end up where the US is right now where people seem to think the president does everything at all times at all levels

Btw, I'm assuming you meant "MEP candidate" when you say "deputy candidate", in english as far as I can tell deputy lost the meaning of "legislature member" in common use, that remained common in Latin languages (italian here, we use the same term)

Just an FYI that it might confuse some people (like it did with me before I switched to thinking about it in italian) why you were asking the deputies of a candidate instead of the candidates themselves

Fixed deputy -> MEP. Thanks!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com