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Comment by oblio | Hacker News Reader

There are direct elections for the parliament. Those "indirect appointees" are the heads of government of each state, it's as direct as it could possibly get.

And the "unelected bureaucrats" are just... bureaucrats. That's how governments are run the world over, even in places like Switzerland.

Or does your country vote regularly for the Director of Rail Transportation in your Ministry of Transportation? Or the Director of Lower Education in your Ministry of Education?

If your country holds referendums for that, your country is, sorry to inform you, bats**t crazy.

Let's please stop spreading anti EU propaganda and adress real concerns. For example the EU needs a full blown border protection agency and external EU border protection should be a 100% EU matter, not a member state matter. The EU should have a unified digital market. Etc.

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> There are direct elections for the parliament.

Not really, you vote for parties local to your country. You can not vote for EP parties directly.

Anyways, ProtectEU, the new "break all encryption if chatcontrol fails" was proposed by a secret group, whose identities still not known. That's even farer away from a good and democratic institution than unelected bureaucrats.

I don't think calling these anti-EU-propaganda is a good thing, they are valid criticism (even if the EU is mainly a good thing), and they should be addressed at some point in time.

> Not really, you vote for parties local to your country. You can not vote for EP parties directly.

The people in the EU parliament are people you vote for, directly.

You can only vote for local parties (at least here), and they send some amount of MEPs to the EP.

You can not vote for MEPs / parties / ideologies not present in your country.

Let's say I think breaking encryption is a bad thing and I would like to support and vote for someone or something that represent my opinion. Even if there are MEPs and parties in the EP that support what I want, there is no such entity in my country so I can vote for someone else who is against my opinions, or just not vote (and help the biggest party).

I can do anything, my opinion would not matter and my vote is useless for me. That's an inherent issue with the parties / integer number of elected officials, but it is much more serve in a "two level system" like the EP elections.

This is literally the case for every democracy in the world. So what are you going on about?

First, we could vote directly for (any) party in the European Parliament, so opinions not reaching the threshold in some countries still could be represented better. And it would make it less likely that people just vote their favorite local party.

In other areas:

For the ChatControl, there should be something so a regulation can not be proposed again and again and stopping just before voting it down.

There should be a way for making EU-wide referendums whose result is binding / obligatory for the EU (council and commission) and thus for member states, too. (This is probably hard if you want "better representation" of different sized countries and probably there would need a fairly high bar for passing.)

Make the European Citizens' Initiative easier / clearer, it could be a simpler, less formal, non binding option to an EU-wide referendum.

I completely agree with you.

Indirect democracy is just oligarchy with extra steps

> Even if there are MEPs and parties in the EP that support what I want, there is no such entity in my country so I can vote for someone else who is against my opinions, or just not vote (and help the biggest party).

Does that mean there’s the potential to form a party around your views?

(Not saying it’s a practical solution for you, but that the system probably would expect a new view to voice itself)

> ProtectEU, the new "break all encryption if chatcontrol fails" was proposed by a secret group, whose identities still not know

This however seems like a non issue to you?

I think that's an issue. In a democracy you needs to know who proposes what, because you can vote only based on that (at least in theory).

"There are direct elections for the parliament" of course but it's not a real parliament in any sense because it does not have full control over the entire EU policy. It's just there mainly for rubberstamping anything thrown its way.

> And the "unelected bureaucrats" are just... bureaucrats. That's\ > That's how governments are run the world over, even in places like Switzerland.

In most other developed countries they are appointed directly by elected officials or through a national well regulated (not self regulated) system.

> Or does your country vote regularly for the Director of Rail Transportation in your Ministry of Transportation?

Nope. But we frequently vote for the party/person who is going to appoint him. Not so option in the EU. Best case you vote a for a government which will appoint a commissioner which might have some say in the matter.

> and adress real concerns. F

Being about as democratic as the late Hapsburg empire (just without the emperor but with extra Kafkaesque bureaucracy) is not a concern? Maybe either granting the parliament full sovereignty or just outright getting rid of it (if nobody want to play a "federation" anymore) could the the first choice.

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