Comment by raron | Hacker News Reader

Comment by raron | Hacker News Reader

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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.

> 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)

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

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