[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You have outdated info about how EU works.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 You have outdated info about how EU works.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.