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0 pointscandiodari7y ago0 comments

Actually this proposal was a commission proposal, so the democratic deficit here is that this proposal could have gone through, EVEN IF it was voted out.

So that's one, in my opinion very big problem.

Second, people are just not aware of what power the EU has. And the politicians I speak to actually see this as an advantage. One told me specifically that without power like this we would still have the insanity of driving on the left of the road in Norway, or would still have the separate currencies (which of course, would also have prevented a lot of problems in Greece, Italy, Spain, Ireland and Portugal, and provided better lives for probably 100 million (!) people).

So that's the second part. Nobody cares about the EU, because there is no unity. Europeans don't feel part of Europe. They feel they're part of France, Belgium, UK, but not of Europe. So they don't care. There is little to no local presence of any EU agency.

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gnomewascool7y ago

> Actually this proposal was a commission proposal, so the democratic deficit here is that this proposal could have gone through, EVEN IF it was voted out.

No! If the parliament had rejected the proposal, then the "ball" would have come back to the Commission, which would have had to amend their proposal, pass it through the Council again, and if successful, returned it to the Parliament, which would be again given the choice of rejecting or passing the amended proposal. (This is similar to what happens in other entities/countries with bicameral legislatives — e.g. the US senate vs. the House of Representatives.) Importantly, without the EU Parliament's approval, the proposal could never become law.

candiodariOP7y ago

Yes !

Now, granted the situation is more complex than just that the commission can push through whatever it wants, but the following statements are true:

1) the commission can block whatever it wants (ie. it has a monopoly on legislative initiative). So it has a negative veto, and can prevent (and does prevent) anything it wants.

2) the commission can, in cooperation with the EU council, create and adopt legislation, without anything more than getting the Parliament's position (but not approval) [1]

3) they can even use other procedures to get what they want [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_legislative_pro...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_legislative_pro...

In practice the commission and council requiring each other is essentially the commission doing what it wants because it's mostly the same people, and even when not, they're necessarily from the same country and party (well, everyone in one has a counterpart in the other that's from the same country and party).

So no. The EU is a dictatorship. The commission has the only lawgiving power, and can block anyone else's initiative. The parliament ... is better paid but no more powerful than my cat ... (plus the politicians in there couldn't organize their way out of a paper bag whereas my cat has claws).

(and let's ignore the fact that the commission also controls the EU court of justice)

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