[elric]

Those two statements are orthogonal. EU elections have little impact on EU institutions. The elections are only for the European Parliament. The European Commission, which controls the institutions and dictates policy, does not get elected by the populace.

There is a lot of criticism (warranted, IMO) on this state of affairs.

[mrtksn]

Right, but the other EU officials are not Belgians or Germans or aliens from another dimension but people who are appointed by the elected governments in every country. As a result, these elections define part of the EU and the elections in every country defines the rest.

In EU countries keep having strong sovereignty, it’s not like the USA. EU here acts more like an alignment institution among countries, it doesn’t actually have powers by itself and it appears that Europeans are still not ready to switch to a US-like system.

[Detrytus]

You have outdated info about how EU works. Since the Lisbon Treaty it is actually evolving towards single super-country, trying to strip member countries from their sovereignty (and mostly succeeding at that, unfortunately).

EDIT: in a typical HN fashion people downvote simple statement of the fact, because they are in denial about the fact.

[p_l]

This is exactly the argument that was used to defang reform of EU Parliament, which gave more power connected directly with voters, and kept the strong but non-transparent EU Commission as the only one with legislative initiative.

Because it's easy to blame "Brussel bureaucrat" when it's hardly visible that said bureaucrat is minister and/or represantive from the party that is now campaigning against "brussel's edict".

[oytis]

I'd argue it would be more democratic like that. If we had pan-European parties with their own pan-European agendas, people would know what they are voting for, and would be much more involved. Instead EU is still rather an international organization where governments of member states set the agenda, so the result is a very indirect way of decision making where an individual voter can hardly understand what impact their vote makes.

[disgruntledphd2]

> You have outdated info about how EU works. Since the Lisbon Treaty it is actually evolving towards single super-country, trying to strip member countries from their sovereignty (and mostly succeeding at that, unfortunately).

Can you point me to the parts of the Lisbon treaty that facilitate this please?

[Detrytus]

Well, for one, many areas now require "qualified majority vote" instead of unanimous decision.

Few key countries (Germany, France and Italy) got their voting weights in both the Council of Ministers and the European Council increased at the expense of everyone else (witch Germany's voting power doubling).

European Central Bank got official recognition.

European Court of Justice got its jurisdiction expanded.

[mrtksn]

It’s a political process that will or will not happen to a point. Currency it’s not there yet, it’s quite far of it and honestly I don’t believe that it will happen before fixing the Eurozone and that’s a hard one.

[tormeh]

The Parliament has veto rights. Nothing gets enacted without parliamentary approval. Which is very good, considering some of the bullshit that comes out of the Commission.

[anticensor]

Legislative veto without legislative initiative is barely useful.

[disgruntledphd2]

True, but note that the national governments (i.e. the Council) also have a veto.

But I do agree that Parliament should be given law making powers, and the Commission should just be enforcement and implementation of said laws.

[aembleton]

Can they remove or update bad legislation that is currently in place?

[disgruntledphd2]

The EU Commission do not dictate policy.

This is a convenient fiction that the EU Council (i.e. the national governments) are very keen to retain, as it insulates them from the consequences of their decisions.

If you really wanted to be tactical about it, one should vote for a disjoint set of parties in the EU vs the national elections, as this would be more likely to lead to effective supervision and assessment of decisions.

[SiempreViernes]

Sure, but the commission is proposed by nationally elected representatives (namely the heads of state) and then approved by the elected European Parliament, so the overall process is not too undemocratic.

Of course, direct election of the commission would be more democratic formally, but the fact is there's not really a truly European polity in the first place so its not clear the outcome would be much better in regards to the problem of the commission being composed of random politicians you never heard of.

[disgruntledphd2]

If you were gonna elect Commissioners/President etc directly, you'd probably end up with something like the US electoral college system.

In fact, given that Ireland (a very small country) would have to have a referendum on it, then I can almost guarantee that such a system would over-weight small countries.

[mariusor]

The Commission doesn't "dictate" policy. They are the body that has the power to initiate legislature, but the Parliament (the democratically elected part of the EU orgs) has to vote on them.

Also from my interpretation of TFA, the people that expect intelligence agencies to be exempted are national interior ministers (not named though), there's no such thing as a "European Union minister", which have no influence at the EU level.