[lazyjones]

> This is appointed by the European Council and requires approval from the European Parliament.

And now let's look at the past 3 presidents: always the same routine, the EP gets presented with 1 candidate and can say yes... or yes. Awesome democracy.

[n4r9]

Presented by the European Council, which is made up of directly elected heads of state. It's imperfect, but as someone living in the UK it's no worse than our own system.

[makomk]

The European Council isn't made up of directly elected heads of state, though - most of its members are indirectly elected prime ministers. This makes it the head of the European Commission at least one step further away from the people's influence than in the UK system. What makes this worse is that the European Commission has the exclusive power to propose new laws, whereas in the UK ordinary directly-elected MPs can do this.

[n4r9]

True, nevertheless in principle it is possible for voters en bloc to express democratic power over the choice of President.

[lazyjones]

I'm not sure comparing with a monarchy is the best effort we can make to judge the merits of the EU political system. ;-)

Living in a small, entirely democratic EU country, I can't say I'm impressed with how the Commission was formed and it's also obviously an inferior system to that of the USA.

[n4r9]

I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that that's a joke about the UK being a monarchy in anything but name! Its democratic issues are much more to do with the House of Lords, FPTP voting system and lack of press balance.

The power to directly elect or remove the top spot is certainly an important facet of democracy, maybe even the most important, but it's still just one of many measures. to be honest I don't think it's really that meaningful to talk about one system being "more democratic" than another, or that "entirely democratic" can apply coherently to anything except some kind of anarchist utopia.

That said, there is such a thing as the global [democracy index](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index) in which the US comes well below the UK and plenty of other EU countries. Note that Norway, also a constitutional and hereditary monarchy, tops the list.

[lazyjones]

> That said, there is such a thing as the global [democracy index](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index) in which the US comes well below the UK and plenty of other EU countries

This is rather meaningless as an indicator of the quality of the political system. The USA was downgraded there in 2016 for various reasons (probably mostly "Trump anxiety") while the political system was left unchanged.

[n4r9]

As the wikipedia article and the report states, the USA's score has been steadily declining for decades and teetering on the brink for years, reflecting a fall in public trust in the functioning of public institutions. I guess you could call that "Trump anxiety" if you want.