[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.