Democracy is not a system to promote meritocracy. It's a system to avoid autocracy, and all other things are exernalities rising from this core purpose.

The point of democracy is to have a constant churn within a large enough powerpool to discourage formation of ruling cliques and oligarchies. It's nice if the chosen representatives are efficient and skillfull, but that's not the point of the system.

There are two other important problems with the system as well: voter turnout and voting in blocs (country or EU party). The reason this is a problem is that the candidates campaign as individuals, but act according to what their group tells them. Sometimes they vote along what their country votes, other times they vote along the lines off what their parliamentary group tells them. But where are the interests of the actual constituents here?

The EU isn't a democracy or even a representative democracy. Notice how lots of people wrote to their MEPs and nothing happened other than MEPs calling their voters stupid? That's because in the EU all decisions are ultimately made by the Commission. The Commission started this, the Commission made it happen and by treaty the Commission is the only body able to actually propose changes to the law.

The EU Parliament quite literally doesn't fit the dictionary definition of Parliament. There isn't any way voters can change this law by voting, not even if every party was for changing it, because even a majority of MEPs cannot change the law. But changing the law is the entire and sole purpose of politicians, so we can observe that MEPs aren't really politicians.

A group elects someone who’s better at statecraft than the group is

That has never been part of the idea of democracy. What makes you think politicians are so great at statecraft? There are no tests they have to pass, assuming you could even make such a test to begin with. What's the definition of statecraft, even?

There's no evidence politicians are smarter or better than the average voter. That's why anyone can turn up and get votes.

Or, from the people’s perspective: elected representatives engage in awful horse-trading and disrespect their constituency’s opinions, and yet gradually everything gets better “somehow.”

For a whole lot of people in the EU things are either stagnant or getting worse. Look at the dire economic performance of Italy since joining the Eurozone: was growing, since flat.

Things don't get better because people repeatedly elect politicians who are superior to themselves. Things, by and large, get better when governments shrink and stay out of things. The fate of the eastern bloc under Soviet rule and then capitalist democratic rule shows that in action (although, now they are at risk of going backwards thanks to things like Article 13).

There are a lot of things you just can’t get done using direct democracy.

Tell that to the Swiss. Most successful country on the continent, by far.

It's true that the EU Parliament doesn't quite work the way you want it to, however it does have the ability to "Censure" the EU Commission by a vote of no confidence:

http://en.euabc.com/word/151

If it did so, a new Commission President would then be nominated, which the EU Parliament could approve based on the nominee's support for a change to the law.

This would be a way of working around the fact that the EU Parliament does not formally possess legislative initiative, which you seem to think it is missing, despite the fact that the law in question was amended and approved by the parliament as part of the legislative process.

The Parliament doesn't get to choose the leader. They can only ratify or delay the decision of those who do. That makes them useless. Even if they fire the entire Commission, the Council will just immediately re-appoint a new President who has exactly the same views and policies.

This kind of "you may be a nuisance but not change anything" arrangement is everywhere in the EU's structure. It's infantilising. It says you can cry if you like and get some attention for a while, but ultimately, the decisions aren't being made by you.

> ...

Thank you for pointing this out.

Edit: Why is the parent comment being downvoted? All of the facts presented are quite public knowledge.

> What's the definition of statecraft, even?

A member of the old boys club who graduated from Eton college seems to be the British definition.

In practice, MEPs are told who to vote for by their advisors. Who had even heard of Ursula von der Leyen until she was voted in?

It's common for europhiles to describe this sort of process as democratic because the Council is made up of national leaders. Unfortunately there's a key detail that makes this step non-functional: Council meetings are held in secrecy. No minutes or voting records are published.

How was von der Leyen selected and why? Nobody knows outside of the national leaders themselves. And there are sadly good reasons to believe that they systematically lie to their populations about what happens in those meetings. For one, Juncker himself has complained about this: leaders support a policy in private at the Council level, then go back home and tell their populations they fought against it and are being forced to do it by the EU.

Given the staggering amount of mendaciousness and duplicity the current anti-Brexit Parliament has been revealing amongst the ruling classes, I have no doubt at all Juncker's complaint is valid. But of course if the EU wanted it could easily fix this: just make Council meetings public so people can see if their leader's acts in those meetings matches their acts back home.

The other problem is the number of levels of indirection. Politicians don't base campaigns on who they'll vote for as leader of the Commission. It's "democratic" only in tortured theory.

I think it's a question of how many steps removed the decision makers are from elected officials.

Probably by people not reading it and having a kneejerk Brexit-related response.

The words I read were what I already believed to be true and indeed would've written myself - and if it wasn't true I'd want to know.