[spwa4]

Why follow the EU's press release instead of stating what's happening? The EU parliament voted - many times. They voted AGAINST having this law at all. The EU council is now threatening to fully override parliament, but "gives parliament another chance" to agree, in hopes this makes the member states more likely to cooperate.

More correct would be to state the in power EU governments have decided to use the EU council power to override the will of both the EU parliament and the member states' own parliaments - for now, by threatening parliament with the override.

[LudwigNagasena]

The EU parliament and the head of states that comprise the EU council are elected by the EU citizens. Why is there such discordance between the two? Isn’t it mostly the same people from the same parties?

[spwa4]

Because in a democracy it's the legislative assembly - parliament - that decides on laws, not the executive.

The EU commission is the executive and represents the currently in power government, NOT parliament.

[LudwigNagasena]

Sure, but I'm asking why there is a discordance between them.

[spwa4]

In this specific case - because Parliament has rejected this law 50 times. Yes, really that much, they've been at it since 11 May 2022. Governments really want access to people's chats, and parliament really does not want to give it to them. Not the EU parliament, not member state parliaments. Almost all of them.

The EU Commission has the power to force this law through, over the objections of all EU member state parliaments and the EU parliament and only the EU Council has the power to stop them. So by allying with the council the EU Commission is hoping to force parliament by threatening them with worse, and showing that the Council will not intervene if they do force worse through.

In general there is discordance, because the EU countries are forced into the union because of the need to compete with other large players like US and China, not because they want to. So every EU country wants to be part of the EU, but they don't want that to mean anything and don't want to give up even the slightest bit of control to the EU. And that's ignoring animosities, such as that France really does not want Germany to have any say whatsoever in what happens in France, or that Spain wants to repress Barcelona's separatism and 100 other issues.

The EU constitution disaster, and that the outcome of that effort was literally worse than the EU imagined was even possible when they started it is a good illustration of the problem.

[SiempreViernes]

This is completely incorrect, the Parliament, the Council, and the Commission always come up with their own version of a proposed regulation (the Commission because they get to create new proposals, the other two because they have to react to comission proposal). Then all three parties sit down and negotiate a final text that becomes law.

[spwa4]

Ah yes, going into details and then leaving out the crucial part. You're technically right about "regulations", which is a technical legal term with a surprise indirect meaning. The surprise is that "directives" also exist.

Of course the situation is that the EU parliament HAS come up with a version of the Chat Control law. It can be summarized very succinctly:

"NO" (obviously I mean that nothing passed parliament, I do get that they did work on a couple dozen versions of the actual law too. However the final outcome really is "NO")

Now, can you tell me how the role of parliament "changes" if they actually follow through on their threat *, which is of course to turn this from a regulation into a directive?

* the threat is that this is the EU council, not the EU Commission, which could do the same (and has in fact done the same for this law, but as pointed out they failed with parliament refusing to pass any kind of compromise at all). The only party that has the power to stop the Commission acting unilaterally to make this law is the EU council, so by getting the EU council to "propose" to parliament, the Commission is signaling that the EU council will choose their side against parliament, and there will be no way to stop them forcing this into law. After this the commission can then claim more legitimacy (because of what happened in the many local parliaments' "fuck the EU and your legitimacy" disasters of the past 2 decades, like the very dramatic fuck-you's to the division rules for illegal immigrants, you can see why they want maximum legitimacy on controversial laws).

Or to put it very very bluntly, this is the commission calling in daddy, because parliament doesn't want to cooperate and daddy EU Council saying "ok, we'll go to parliament together, PARLIAMENT! BEHAVE! You're going to listen and you're going to cooperate!".

And the problem is that in a democracy one might point out that if parliament doesn't want to cooperate, that's the end of the line. That is in fact a pretty good definition of the idea of democracy.

P.S. I must say, the EU Commission has never cared (at least not successfully) about social policy in the EU. Frankly, the Commission is normally opposed to social progress when it interferes with business. So I find it very hard to understand why the EU Commission is risking yet another legitimacy disaster over ... protecting kids? I've worked for them for a long time and despite the past, they really care about their legitimacy, they don't care about kids (or rather they see themselves as "the voice of reason" in a hopelessly divided Europe, and it's country parliaments that care about social issues, and sometimes even smaller parliaments (like ironically the Brussels parliament currently forcing a government shutdown over social spending). Now, the EU as a whole and the Commission specifically may be right about them often being the voice of reason but it's been made crystal-clear time and time again: the EU population does not want any voice overriding their countries' parliaments, reasonable or otherwise. This was made clear from the very beginning with the Charles De Gaulle - Robert Shuman incident "Un Boche, un bon Boche, mais un Boche tout de même", calling into question the wisdom of letting "Un bon Boche" (he means: a reluctant Nazi collaborator) unify Europe with the creation of the EU.

[SiempreViernes]

> "NO" (obviously I mean that nothing passed parliament, I do get that they did work on a couple dozen versions of the actual law too. However the final outcome really is "NO")

The Parliament decided to allow negotiations on the basis of 520 amendments to the commission text (ref: A9-0364/2023), of which around 80 are full deletions. Summarising the full draft as NO is simply not accurate.

[spwa4]

Yes, just as it always does, and it very very rarely goes anywhere, and never involves the council. Isn't the last time the council acted like this the Treaty of Lisbon/EU constitution?

I mean, only if you want to make an incredibly, extremely generous interpretation of what's happening, but sure, what you're saying is a nanometer within what is theoretically possible. Incredibly, incredibly unlikely but possible. It doesn't explain why the commission acts at all in this case, when they almost never act after rejection, and it doesn't explain at all why the most powerful EU institution is suddenly involved. You would need to explain why this justifies the same amount of attention that the Treaty of Lisbon got (you know, when French and the Netherlands' voters rejected what could be interpreted as the existence of the EU, that's certainly how a bunch of political parties saw it)

But is it possible? Yes. Procedures allow this. Sure.