As a UE citizen I very much approve of Vestager's activity, if I'm not mistaken she's one of the main reasons why we now pay close to nothing in terms of roaming charges whenever we visit another country (which is a very, very big thing).

If people like her had been more active even earlier in the internet space (think 2008-2010) maybe we wouldn't have had to deal with the current FANG oligopoly. I personally used to work for a local business directory whose data was almost instantly copied and used by the recently launched back then Google Places. There was no recourse for a company like ours back then (other then keeping our fingers crossed for the likes of Yelp in their fight against Google, which goes to say how helpless we were), so the fact that a person like Vestager now exists and has so much power to control this sort of bad behavior is all for the best.

EU certainly has good marketing. They do a few very obvious nice things for the consumers, like the roaming fees, and then nobody cares much about the rest – billions wasted on prestige projects, the economic and immigration crises, the terrible agricultural politics, the malicious copyright legislation, and so on.

> the economic and immigration crises,

Yes, nobody cares. Clearly, you've never heard about Brexit. Europe and immigration might have played a little role in that debate.

Or the rise of populism in Germany, France, the Netherlands and other countries.

Immigration is obviously such a non-issue that the AfD or the Front National (don't know the current name off the top of my head - they renamed) have absolutely capsized in recent elections.

Generalising, of course, but a lot of people don’t really care. Yes, the discontent is slowly growing, but it’s still small minorities that really oppose EU. All of western Europe (aside from the UK) have pro-EU governments at the moment.

Yeah, but most of Western Europe also has a pro-EU majority at the moment. You may just call it marketing, but stuff like Schengen, free trade, cultural exchange programs, funding for underdeveloped regions, and yes, EU roaming, are very popular. Of course, you can call each and every political achievement "just marketing", but then the term becomes meaningless and just demonstrates bias.

> most of Western Europe also has a pro-EU majority at the moment.

Depends a lot on how you ask the question. The pro-EU governments are working to turn EU into a superstate. The great majority of people don’t want that.

But thanks to the big visible benefits, like not having to change money, show your passport and pay roaming fees when going on vacation, most people still have a generally favorable opinion of EU, that lets them get away with their vision of the "ever closer union", despite the lack of democratic support of it.

It’s a common problem of indirect democracy. People really care about issue A and B, and elect politicians that align with them on those issues. Those politicians then have a free hand to go against the will of the people on everything else, leading to lots and lots of things happening without a democratic mandate.

If you only get one vote every 4-5 years, it’s almost impossible to make that vote count for all the decisions that’ll need to be made in between.

> Depends a lot on how you ask the question. The pro-EU governments are working to turn EU into a superstate. The great majority of people don’t want that.

Please show evidence of that statement. I'm not seeing anyone really pushing for federalism, in fact quite the opposite, holding the current group of countries model but with stronger ECB (bank) and ECJ (court) to prevent failures like Greece and Spain had.

Some slight moves to harmonize trade laws have happened, but not a lot. Some more in banking laws.

The first meeting of EU leaders after Brexit was devoted, entirely, to discussing the apparently urgent EU army.

Guess how much time they spent discussing that the EU was just rejected completely by the biggest vote in British history: none whatsoever.

The EU isn't even federalising, really. It's just centralising. That's happening despite the fact that very few want it because they aren't allowed to disagree.

New treaties aren't being signed, but that doesn't matter: the existing treaty is self amending and anyway, the ECJ can be relied on to always re-interpret the treaties to grant the EU new powers it was explicitly not meant to have. The Kafkaesque way they decided that state aid rules allowed the EU to control corporate tax rates is an example of that: the Commission was never given that power, explicitly and by design, but they took it anyway. With a corrupt Supreme Court ideologically devoted to increasing executive power, treaties and laws don't mean anything.

So I'd argue if you can't see it happening you're not paying attention.

> The first meeting of EU leaders after Brexit was devoted, entirely, to discussing the apparently urgent EU army.

The Brexit vote was on 2016-6-23. The next EU Council meeting was on 2016-6-28. According to the minutes [1] and conclusios the Council discussed the Syrian refugee crisis, economics, external relations and the Brexit vote. No EU army was discussed, the only defence-related thing was EU-NATO cooperation.

* [1] http://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-27-2016-INIT... * [2] https://www.consilium.europa.eu/media/21645/28-euco-conclusi...

> Guess how much time they spent discussing that the EU was just rejected completely by the biggest vote in British history: none whatsoever.

Immediately after this Council meeting the EU27 (all member states sans the UK) met in an informal meeting whose whole topics were of course Brexit and the state of the European Union.

https://www.consilium.europa.eu/media/20462/sn00060-en16.pdf

The minutes of that meeting merely say that Theresa May informed them of the outcome, which they all knew already of course. It says nothing else. Quite possibly nobody else spoke.

The meeting I'm referring to is this one

https://amp.dw.com/en/uk-will-oppose-any-idea-of-eu-army-des...

In the years since the vote I haven't seen the EU agree on any changes triggered by the vote or even really discuss why it happened. From the agendas of their meetings you could think it'd never happened at all.

In recent local elections AfD more than doubled their previous results and is the second biggest Party in every of those local parliaments.

You need to adjust your irony detector.

> EU certainly has good marketing.

Surely you're kidding? The EU historically has terrible problems in transparency, effective communication of policies and general reputation problems because of the distance between it and its citizens. They have terrible marketing, famously so.

The EU is terrible in many ways. But all the big infrastructure project they fund with prominent EU branding (this bridge/airport/tunnel was kindly funded by the EU) as well as consumer initiatives like the roaming rules are all excellent marketing.

This sounds like bad faith argument, surely the EU investing billions in infrastructure or adopting consumer protection is not just marketing? That's a lot of effort to go through just to get the EU flag in people's faces.

Even if this is a bad faith argument - and it's fine if it is - that only serves to illustrate the EU's 'marketing' is not effective.

No, some of the infrastructure is of course useful in itself (although a good chunk is wasted, like this lovely report explains: https://www.eca.europa.eu/Lists/ECADocuments/SR14_21/QJAB140... ), but the prominent signs and flags proclaiming that said infrastructure was funded by the EU is certainly marketing.

You have no idea, in EU projects, even big ones, sometimes 66% or even more was from EU restructuring or agricultural funds, at least in Poland. A few extra from innovation and science funds, but those are peanuts.

I think you dropped an /s

Yeah, because professional technologists are doing such a great job in US. Proliferation of monopolies, privacy scandals and elections meddling are primary examples of how great it’s going. Not to mention your companies are basically demanding tax breaks to actually pay tax at all. Woohoo, greatest democracy on the planet.

> Proliferation of monopolies, privacy scandals and elections meddling are primary examples of how great it’s going. Not to mention your companies are basically demanding tax breaks to actually pay tax at all.

All of these can be found in EU, the same regulatory capture, retarded copyright laws pushed by media industry, blatant nepotism (German officials lobbying for Gazprom, Deutsche Bank bribing Russian officials buying deals by giving good positions to Russian officials' children while evading taxes) etc.

The only difference is that IT is a scorched field in EU, so no regulatory capture in this domain.

She has a track record of understanding tech quite well. Cannot see the downsides of her also being an educated politician.

At least she's elected by the people of Europe. No, sorry, I got that wrong. As with all the other commissioners, the only ones able to initiate legislation affecting everyone in the EU, she's appointed by an elite clique who know how to deal with recalcitrant folk in Denmark, France and Ireland whose majority vote is ignored. As someone remarked ' We have no power to sack them. They don't have to account for their actions. We can't elect them but we can download a poster picture of them.'

The European Commission is accountable to the directly-elected European Parliament.

Parliament will hold hearings over the next month to scrutinise the Commissioner Designates and will then hold a vote to approve the entire college of Commissioners.

And this process has, actually, resulted in unsuitable candidates being either replaced entirely or portfolios being redistributed in the past (including the last time around in 2014).

Parliament can also sack the Commission at any time if it so desires. That last happened to the Santer Commission in 1999.

In addition to the confirmation vote by the Parliament (which will be tough this time ... considering the president only had a single vote majority) they are also nominated by the national governments (each government a commissioner) thus the differences in countries are represented as well.

This is more democratic legitimation than most ministers in most state governments have, where ministers are often appointed by the head of government without confirmation. (The EU commission is similar to a government and commissioners are similar to ministers in their role)

The EU Parliament is much like the Supreme Soviet. It has votes. There are elections. Things are set up such that this can only change small details around the edges in ways the elites already approve of, nothing fundamental.

Look at how the head of the Commission was chosen. Remember, the entire Commission reports to one person. The sub-Commissioners are theoretically (by treaty) nominated by each country but in practice the head of the Commission controls all the appointments. As Jean-Claude Juncker openly admitted, if he didn't like an appointment he'd simply reject it. He isn't meant to have this power, but claims he does and I believe him. The EU is full of things like that.

So the entire Commission reports to von der Leyen. How did this woman get the job? Nobody can tell you. The decision was made in secret. No minutes of those meetings were published. No leader justified the decision. If there was a vote at all, nobody can see which countries voted for her or why. It just ... happened. Literally the only statement I've seen about what criteria was used was, "it'd be great if this time we had a woman", which came from some EU President (there are several and I forgot which one). So I guess that must have been why she got the job.

Theoretically the Parliament can pick the head of the Commission. When they picked Juncker last time around, the EU went along with it and liked to claim it was getting more democratic as a result. But this time, when MEPs committed the hopelessly un-woke crime of nominating a man, their nomination was ignored.

In true Soviet style, the EU Parliament got a vote ... but because MEPs didn't want the terminally incompetent von der Leyen, it had to be fixed. No problem - MEPs were presented with a vote in which von der Leyen was the only candidate they could vote for!

Despite her being literally the only candidate on the voting paper, so many abstained from this farce she still got the lowest number of votes in history.

So that's the EU. There are votes, there are politicians, there's a Parliament. Just that none of them matter.

You forget to mention that the head of the commission "Ursula v.d. Leyen" never was a candidate. The candidate that campaigned for election called "Manfred Weber" suddenly stepped down right after the election and "Ursula" was installed. This is the most blatant anti-democratic thing I've ever seen.

But it gets worse: Ursula v.d. Leyen has a history of trying to implement countrywide internet cencorship in Germany (and is since called "Zensursula"). And could only be stopped because of a gigantic rise of the Pirate Party (now defunct) to levels that became dangerous to the establishment.

That's misleading. It wasn't a bait-and-switch. In fine EU tradition there was long drawn-out horse-trading and compromise and settlement on a candidate tolerable enough to be accepted by 28 different countries and the European Parliament. Enough country leaders felt strongly enough that they couldn't accept Weber that they didn't endorse him.

The Spitzenkandidat system isn't law per se - it's a (very new) convention mostly being pushed by the European Parliament. The European Council (that is, the presidents, prime ministers and chancellors of each EU country) has always had to give or withhold an endorsement to whoever the European Parliament proposed to lead the European Commission.

The point is if people knew that they would get v.d. Leyen they never would have voted for EVP. The voter has apparently zero control over who gets the most powerful position in the EU. Note that commissioners not only have exectuive power but also legistlive power. Hence the EU is inherently undemocratic, a blatant power grap by the elites that needs to be abolished entirely ASAP.

Do you get to elect your defense or sports minister in your country?

In most EU countries: Yes. They are elected members of the Parliament who are assigned a portfolio by the prime minister. To be clear: someone elected them, in the example of Ireland a jurisdiction like Kerry would elect a number of parliament members and the prime minister could select any elected members from their party to form the cabinet.

she's an elected member of the Denmark parliament.

Yeah, all the power in EU is vested within unelected officials. Their so-called parliament is a farce to give EU a veneer of democracy.

States regularly fail to reign in their own most powerful industries due to regulatory capture, so other states have to do it. It's better than nothing.

EU is pretty captured, too. The copyright stuff that passed earlier this year is one massive boondoggle for the publishing industry.

Sure it is, but mostly by EU companies.

The deficiencies you've mentioned are real. However, given the less than impressive performance of individuals to date in the US and Europe who are allegedly qualified, she's can only be an improvement.

What kind of ass-backwards logic is this? This is exactly the kind of thinking that got us Trump. “Qualified people aren’t cutting it, so let’s bring in somebody completely unqualified to shake things up”.

Saying she's unqualified is a bit of a stretch - five years as a competition commissioner shows she has some relevant experience even if she's lacking in terms of an academic and industry background.

In what way is Vestager not qualified? Is there an example of an action she has taken that a more qualified person wouldn't have?

The problem is that pretty much the only way to be thoroughly qualified is to work for one of the companies that is about to be regulated. That is called the revolving door and it's bad.

Trump is incompetent and corrupt.