"We decide on something, leave it lying around and wait and see what happens. If no one kicks up a fuss, because most people don't understand what has been decided, we continue step by step until there is no turning back. "
And that Mr. Junker dares to say this in the open shows the root of the issue - politicians are no longer afraid of their constituents just as corporations are no longer afraid of their customers. They know that even if they do something almost universally disliked at worst they have to back off a bit and lay low for a while. Real consequences are practically unheard of.
There's a secondary result from this strategy: If you only listen when people scream bloody murder, you train everyone to freak out over every little thing because it's the only way they have any evidence that their views are being taken into account.
Exactly, they knew there would be some amount of backlash, they just didn't think it would impact their bottom line through bad PR. Plenty of companies pull off consumer-hostile decisions all the time with minimal fuss.
"We decide on something, leave it lying around and wait and see what happens. If no one kicks up a fuss, because most people don't understand what has been decided, we continue step by step until there is no turning back. "
https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jean-Claude_Juncker
It is just rare, that a EU president says stuff like this loud in the open. Otherwise it is politics 101.