[YesWeWill]

What ballot box? I can't vote about the Commission... It was chosen by a vote of ministers but that minister was actually from a opposition party here! This """democratic""" system is broken. And my vote about the EU Parliament affects only 2% of the total seats.

[simiones]

The Comission is nominated by the European Council - made up of the heads of government/state of the member states, which are usually democratically elected in some way - presumably your vote can influence who 1 particular member of the European Council is.

Then, the nomination of the Comission and individual comissioners are validated or not by the European Parliament, whose members are again chosen democratically in every member state.

So, while it is quite indirect, our vote does influence the membership of the comission.

Of course, as in any such system, the more direct way of gaining some kind of influence is to try to organize others to vote a certain way, to participate yourself, or to organize others to campaign together to directly convince/shame the members of the Comission or Parliament or Council to take particular policies.

[YesWeWill]

As I said, the member was from an opposition party. Nobody of the population wanted them in the government in the first place, they were there due to a background deal. The EU makes people who nobody voted for too powerful.

> Then, the nomination of the Comission and individual comissioners are validated or not by the European Parliament, whose members are again chosen democratically in every member state.

No, each member state votes about their own portion of seats. So Germany and France decides for everyone. That's shit. Germans go crazy anti-science and everybody pays - except the Germans who get the EU to find solution out of the money it takes from all states.

[simiones]

> No, each member state votes about their own portion of seats. So Germany and France decides for everyone.

Seats in the European Parliament are apportioned based on population (with some rounding to allow a maximum of 751 MEPs), so it is about as close to democratic as possible. Also, France and Germany have ~24% of the total seats, how exactly are they deciding for everyone?

[YesWeWill]

It's really not democratic at all. Democratic would be if we all voted about all seats. How am I supposed to change anything ever if I vote about 2% of the seats? Sorry not sorry for being born where I was.

> how exactly are they deciding for everyone?

That's easy - by building the largest cohesive blocs. The rest is divided to small bickering parties with just a few seats each (often just one each), and easy to conquer.

[simiones]

Assuming your country is roughly 2% of the EU's population, why would you expect your influence to be much higher than ~2% of the European Parliament?

In fact, having allocated seats for each country is bending pure democracy towards giving more power to small countries than they would otherwise have. In a purely democratic system, a small country would often not even get 1 seat, unless it was extraordinarily well organized (assume every person in the EU had a chance to vote for each of the 751 MEPs - then, even if your country was voting 100% with the same politician for every seat, they would affect 2% of each vote).

> That's easy - by building the largest cohesive blocs. The rest is divided to small bickering parties with just a few seats each (often just one each), and easy to conquer.

Nothing stops politicians from the smaller countries to also form a bloc. The fact that our politicians (I'm also a national of a smaller / less powerful EU country, Romania) are prone to bickering and not much else is a different problem entirely.

[matthewmacleod]

Take your pick. Your local government, your national government, or your European government all have an aggregate effect on national an international energy policy, even if that impact is not direct.

If you have a better idea what it means to be "held responsible" I'm happy to hear it.