[rayiner]

It approves the laws but can’t originate the laws, which makes it unlike every other democratic legislature. That means that the European Commission actually in charge of steering the government, while the Parliament can only really approve or disapprove. Moreover, the Commission can directly promulgate regulations that have the force of law. So you have a putatively administrative organ that both initiates actual legislation and can itself enact regulations that are effectively laws. I don’t think there is any other democratic system that centralizes that much lawmaking authority in its administrative organ.

Optimally, democracy is participative. People don’t just vote, they govern themselves. Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America” does a great job capturing what that looks like. Today, the most democratic systems are what you have in the Scandinavian countries. Small, homogenous electorates can achieve social consensus on what their society should look like. And then they can act through parliament to effectuate changes.

The E.U.-wide electorate is so big and fractious that it has basically zero ability to achieve social consensus. And the E.U. Parliament has no power to initiate legislation anyway. So “democracy” is reduced to rubber stamping the initiatives of the Commission, which are in turn largely decided by the permanent bureaucracy.