With time the EU Parliament has seen its powers increasing, and there is reason to expect it will continue to do so.
Parliament approving what the Commission does is of no use for repealing laws.
The President is not elected by the Parliament. They experimented with that in the Juncker era, now it's back to being controlled (in theory) by the Council. The Parliament was given a "vote" that consisted of a list of options with one name on it. They could literally vote for von der Leyen or not vote at all. Even then she only barely scraped past quorum.
The Council meanwhile isn't democratic. Everything it does is secret. How did von der Leyen get the top job despite being manifestly unsuitable? Nobody knows. It's secret and never leaked.
that's how confidence votes work on most parliamentary republics.
Moreover, even at the universal suffrage, “democracy” doesn't mean electing a dictator with no popular oversight every x years.
In the case of the European commission:
- No EU citizen gave them the explicit mandate to enforce chat control
- If the initiative is repelled, and they continue to force freedom-reducing initiatives, they'll face 0 consequences.
- At most, the parliament can do is strike down a law. There is of course a very unbalanced distribution of power – the elected people have no initiative.
- The EC is corrupt: many commissioners cash fat checks from the private sector after their term, with 0 consequences.[0],[1]
- Lobbyism is everywhere. Corporations with unlimited money bribe officials, harass them, and push their agenda. Anyone close to the EU will tell you that it's much worse than you think.
“Democracy” is not the power of the corporations, and citizens, maybe, if we have time for it and if it doesn't eat into our profits.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/mar/15/european-commi...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/jul/10/former-eu-digit...
As long as there are people there will be struggles like this. Being on the winners side makes things easier, so losing once makes it harder to go back, but it isn't impossible since we have gotten here from much worse situations.
Realistically current EU countries are locked in. They aren't allowed to reintroduce their own currency, but doing so is step one towards leaving.
By the time a regime reaches "existential threat" level it's too late. You're already far gone, any and all political opposition has been driven underground and the regime has loyalists in place in all institutions and positions of power. There is no way to organize any resistance because attempts to do so are crushed immediately, the press is controlled and you're in the minority anyway because the majority are propagandized and kept in fear of instability or supposed external threats to their way of life.
The EU is frankly far too close to that dystopian end already. It constantly justifies its own power via reference to external enemies of various kinds e.g. capitalist America, the European press barely challenges it and the institutions are controlled by EU loyalists who are willing to rip up the rules rather than let the EU lose control. Even in the UK that was always more distant than other nations, they went through multiple severe constitutional crises triggered by Remainers fighting to overturn the referendum. It wasn't at all clear that the UK could actually leave despite the referendum result not being in doubt.
IMO the very fact that you think the UK left for "questionable reasons" is already part of the propaganda doing its job. The people who get out early are the only ones who actually can get out. By the time the case is unambiguous (to you), you're the one being labelled as questionable.
Also note that the EU don't like Montenegro using the Euro and tolerate it only because it's tiny/doesn't matter.
So yeah - if a country really wanted to leave - a shared currency would not stop it.
https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-leader-approve-defense-mi...
"EU leaders approve updated military plan. The strategy envisions the creation of an EU rapid deployment force of up to 5,000 soldiers."
However the EU doesn't need a physical army to stop a country leaving. It just needs sufficiently good control of local politics and law enforcement via loyalists in the countries establishment, which it has already. The EU has already proven it can replace governments in Italy and Greece against the will of the electorate, simply via "soft power" mechanisms like access to ECB liquidity, ECJ judgements and control over local institutions.
In other words an inability to leave the EU doesn't look like an army crushing a well organized political opposition. It looks like that opposition being blacklisted from the press, being spied on by the EU secret police, found guilty of vague laws like "misinformation" with judgements upheld by the European courts, votes being tampered with or outright ignored and more.
This is no theoretical problem. Anti-EU referendums in European countries are frequently ignored, even when in theory they are constitutionally binding. In the UK the Electoral Commission, the supposedly neutral body that runs the election and referendum process itself, was run by EU loyalists who professed in public that they wanted Leave to lose and spent significant amounts of time prosecuting Leave campaigners (fortunately their cases were ruled harassment and tossed out by the courts).
The EU Commission also had a long track record of classifying true reports about their activities in the British press as "myths". These days they'd call it misinformation and try to prosecute the journalists in question.
Ultimately it doesn't matter if a majority of the population want to leave, or reject a new EU proposal, if the people who rule them don't care about democracy and control the levers of power. That's how all dictatorships work.
Yeah, that's why the UK didn't leave in the end right? lol. Does "Non-biding referendum" rings a bell?
> long track record of classifying true reports about their activities in the British press as "myths".
Ah yes the trustworthy British press saying German kids can't write to Santa because of GDPR. Yes
Yes, keep talking, I like to make a collection of anti-EU talking points (from Peter Thiel's think tank most likely).
For all the criticism the EU deserves, it's very telling when the narrative turns into manipulation
UK was the first where it wasn't ignored. After the vote I remember being told several times by Europeans they didn't really believe it'd ever be implemented, exactly due to the track record of European countries in ignoring referendums that didn't go the EU's way.
Even then it was a very close run thing. The Remainers in Parliament were willing to create a constitutional crisis to try and get the referendum overturned a.k.a. the "People's Vote", and were holding the government hostage to get that. It was only a a lucky break (the Lib Dem leader going full delusional) that allowed Johnson to break the deadlock, go the country and allow the electorate to purge the Remainer MPs who had lied to their voters about their true position. But make no mistake, that was the worst constitutional crisis the UK experienced in living memory.
>> Ah yes the trustworthy British press saying German kids can't write to Santa because of GDPR
That story came from the German press and was correct:
https://www.welt.de/kmpkt/article183978370/Weihnachtsmarkt-i...
You see how easily you're manipulated by the EU? They've convinced you and others that if the press criticizes the EU the press must be lying. But it's almost never the case.
The EU has taken down their myths site now. It was trash. Not only totally focused on the British press, but I remember quite clearly flicking through them back when the site was live and noticing that all of them were admitted to be true, with the "debunking" (such as it was) being always along the lines of, "this is true but it's justified" or "we prefer an alternative interpretation", or "we don't phrase it like that".
So one specific case where the lists are sent to the city government and shown in public now means "children can't write to Santa?" Way to blown out of proportion. (And they could, if their parents consented to it)
Thanks for showing how easy it is to be manipulated by anti-EU propaganda.
Yes, the Welt article is not lying, the propagandists are, as usual
"they could, if their parents consented"
double lol
It's funny that the results of WWII were for America to enable a soft version of the fourth Reich and the Japanese east asian coprosperity sphere. BUT we built it under our auspices, with the rule being that free speech was somewhat necessary for a free market. (skip the part about torturing Muslims and communists). Here we are. Will Europe now become Hungary or Turkey??!
Yes... this was the original comment I was responding to, which seems to have totally disappeared. Thanks.
> we have gotten here from much worse situations.
A wise remark. But we'll only keep finding better situations if we keep calling out bullshit.
Maybe people just need to take more care which leaders they elect, if they don't like the policies that result from it.