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by simiones 1377 days ago
> 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?

1 comments

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.

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.