Does Germany have a disproportionate amount of control over the EU? Or are you saying the support is already split and Germany is the deciding factor in this case? Or both?

They have a proportionate control over the EU due to their population. Right now the vote went to the council where it needs a qualified majority (I think). This means that 55% of the member states (16) have to vote for it and 65% of the population has to have voted for it.

Just to note first about the other answers: the EU Parliament is really not very important. Most decisions are made within the Council, which as said elsewhere, votes based on population weight. The Parliament does seem to exercise real power over the Commission but beyond that...not much.

Germany is influential because they have a large population i.e. high vote weight in the Council AND they lead a bloc of other nations with similar values (Austria, Belgium, Netherlands, etc.).

It is worth noting though: the UK leaving the EU will likely change this (they usually voted with Germany and had a 13% weight of the EU population). Germany will likely retain some moral leadership but, at the very least, a blocking minority vote (35% of population and 4 members) is possible (the most likely scenario is a France/Italy combination with two other minor members).

In this case, the parliament and council are equally important as they both have to adopt identical versions of the proposal as per the ordinary legislative procedure.

It is not really about certain countries having more control than others. Germany has the largest population in the EU, and since MEPs apportionment is proportional to population, 99 out of 785 MEPs are German. It's a matter of demographics.

MEPs are not directly proportional to population, but degressively so, where the smallest countries have more and the largest countries have less representation than they would on a purely proportional basis. But this is about Sweden's vote in the Council, where each country casts a vote as a country, but that vote is weighted by that country's population.

Germany will in fact have the worst ratio of population per member of parliament after the 2019 elections, with 860k people per MEP vs Maltas 77k people per MEP, on the other end of the scale:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apportionment_in_the_European_...

Wow. That's even worse than the US Electoral College (where California has approximately 700k people per vote while Wyoming has only approximately 200k people per vote).

Worth bearing in mind, however, that this is a deliberate decision stemming from the founding of the ECSC – the goal being to make sure that votes in smaller member states have additional political power to help offset the de facto greater economic and soft power of larger states.

Like all of these things, it's a bit of a fudge and it's reasonable to ask if it's the right approach – but it's not an accidental outcome.

That’s true of the Electoral College as well, but doesn’t and shouldn’t insulate it from criticism.

Is there an Optimal Constituency Algorithm that one can apply to their government to ensure less populous constituencies still get represented?

You say worse, but these discrepancies are by design, both in the US and EU. They’re there to stop much larger interests from steamrollering smaller but different interests that they might not care about or understand

That all comes with some strings attached, as the very same people who negotiated that compromise in US have noted:

"If a pertinacious minority can control the opinion of a majority, respecting the best mode of conducting it, the majority, in order that something may be done, must conform to the views of the minority; and thus the sense of the smaller number will overrule that of the greater, and give a tone to the national proceedings. Hence, tedious delays; continual negotiation and intrigue; contemptible compromises of the public good. And yet, in such a system, it is even happy when such compromises can take place: for upon some occasions things will not admit of accommodation; and then the measures of government must be injuriously suspended, or fatally defeated. It is often, by the impracticability of obtaining the concurrence of the necessary number of votes, kept in a state of inaction. Its situation must always savor of weakness, sometimes border upon anarchy.

...

It is not difficult to discover, that a principle of this kind gives greater scope to foreign corruption, as well as to domestic faction, than that which permits the sense of the majority to decide; though the contrary of this has been presumed. The mistake has proceeded from not attending with due care to the mischiefs that may be occasioned by obstructing the progress of government at certain critical seasons. When the concurrence of a large number is required by the Constitution to the doing of any national act, we are apt to rest satisfied that all is safe, because nothing improper will be likely to be done, but we forget how much good may be prevented, and how much ill may be produced, by the power of hindering the doing what may be necessary, and of keeping affairs in the same unfavorable posture in which they may happen to stand at particular periods.

...

It may happen that this majority of States is a small minority of the people of America; and two thirds of the people of America could not long be persuaded, upon the credit of artificial distinctions and syllogistic subtleties, to submit their interests to the management and disposal of one third. The larger States would after a while revolt from the idea of receiving the law from the smaller. To acquiesce in such a privation of their due importance in the political scale, would be not merely to be insensible to the love of power, but even to sacrifice the desire of equality. It is neither rational to expect the first, nor just to require the last. The smaller States, considering how peculiarly their safety and welfare depend on union, ought readily to renounce a pretension which, if not relinquished, would prove fatal to its duration."

(Federalist Papers, #22)

This was originally written to explain why one-state-one-vote arrangement that existed under the Articles of Confederation was not an acceptable arrangement. But it clearly applies to EC and similar systems as well - the only question is where the "fatal" line is.

That was done intentionally to insulate the smaller/less populated states from the control of larger/more populated states.

So, if I'm understanding this right, it's in Germany and Sweden's own political interests to significantly increase their populations?

It’s in most countries’ political interests to increase their populations, if they can feed them.

Not really. You have one vote in the council per country. For it to be a majority you need both the number of countries >55% and the amount of population >65%. Population is defined as people with "usual residence"in the country. I can't find clarity on this right now but eg refugees would normally not be included. So it's really long term population increase which is rather rare in Europe.

With 83 million people Germany has 16.18% of EU residents (18.5% post Brexit). Adding 1 million increases the weight by around ~.18% (or ~.23% post Brexit) - assuming you get people from outside the EU and thus an overall EU population increase. Thinking strategically, you could think this matters if this is a long term trend. But factually you have to have quite a lot of shifting population (within-EU migration) to change the set of possible alliances that can reach 65%.

Moreover, even the smallest country retains their individual voting weight, so if one country grew so big to overshadow all others they could still reign it in through majority vote.

And then split into multiple smaller countries in order to get better vote per capita ratios.

Of course, an expert conspiracy theorist will note that the more or less culturally and linguistically homogeneous group of about twenty million people living in the north of Europe are already split into a vote-buffing four countries ...

> linguistically homogeneous group

I beg to differ. Finnish is as far removed from Swedish and Danish as Hungarian. Italian is probably closer to either than each other. Swedish and Danish are (at least on reading level) mutually intelligible.

There are about 20 million speakers of Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Faroese and Swedish (including native Swedish-speakers in Finland). If we added the Finnish-speaking population to the mix we'd end up with a population of over 25 million -- not 20.

That being said, I'd say Finns are quite close to the other Nordic countries culturally, even though there is a clear language barrier.

For those who don't know what this is about, Finnish and Sami aren't Indo-European languages like the other Nordic languages are, while Danish, Norwegian and Swedish are closely related and somewhat mutually intelligible.

Three countries. Norway is not part of the EU.

MEPs don't matter in this case. They've already voted. What matters now is how the EU Council votes. As far as I know, they need a qualified majority, meaning that 16 out of the 28 member states have to be for and 65% of the population of the union.

It's a canard to talk about this in terms of 'representation or votes'.

MEPs have very little power, and it was designed that way.

Were this democratic, the underlying MEP issues would have been integrated long ago as the MEPs would have had a hand in crafting the bill.

As it stands, they are a rubber stamp, or failsafe on some legislation.

MEP's cannot even punt the unelected entities which make the law in the EU - a democratic deficit which is unique in the modern world.

A better alternative to the A13 conundrum would be to 'start creating Googles' instead of having to legislate at them from 10K kilmoeters away.

It is fairly easy to calculate the support, after applying the voting rule[1]. Nonetheless, the decision is now in the hands of the EU Council. It is also irrelevant, whether or not there were any mutually beneficial exchanges between the Franco-German alliance to revive this directive, to be passed into law.

[1] https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/council-eu/voting-system/...

Considering Germany is the one that first proposed it, I'd say the chances of that happening are quite slim. You're better off convincing several other countries to vote against it.

Yeah. It pretty much says that the smaller countries changing their votes doesn't have any effect without for example Germany doing the same.

It's worse than that: the German press pretty much runs the show.

wtf is this crap? You're posting basically "any explanation at all" and saying that because it's an explanation, it's what you believe. Anyone could do that for anything

not really. This fits. Germany has much less power than it did during the Greek Crisis. It is in no position of throwing EU countries on its knees and destroying them economically anymore. It is in no position of forcing UK to stay in the EU. It is paralyzed by migrants, nice job CIA.

No worries in 20-30 years you will see it at the movies. Just remember where you read it first.

"It fits" is a really really low standard to believe something.

In theory I'd agree with you. In practice so many people hold so many beliefs directly contradicted by completely unambiguous evidence that "it fits" is already a substantial step ahead of many individual's views. But more importantly, it's important that some people can and do hold divergent views rather than everybody all adopting the one most probable view.

The reason is that most probable does not mean right, and those who hold divergent views can help progress society by pursuing research in things that others would find to be a waste of time. In cases where they happen to be correct, the introduction of compelling evidence (beyond "it fits") can help reshape our understanding and ultimately change what the 'most probable' view is!

A tangent on a tangent, but if people required their views start with the standard of "it fits", I think that'd be one giant leap forward for society as a whole!

Germany is busy building Putin pipeline to bypass all other EU countries, and will vote whatever France tells them to vote in exchange for the support.