In the EU we have the Parliament, which is elected by the people, the Council which is composed by Prime Ministers, Presidents, whoever rules each country and the Commission, which is proposed by the Council and elected by the Parliament. Not so different from what I see in my country.
EP elections are well publicized and every EU citizen has the right to vote on it
"Every five years EU citizens choose who represents them in the European Parliament, the directly-elected institution that defends their interests in the EU decision-making process. The next European elections will take place in 2024."
I always vote in the EP election.
I just find it incredible that when the results are in the people at the top are some guys I've never heard or seen before. And I don't believe I'm uncommonly ill-infomed.
Moving power further away from the electorate should be a last resort for issues that can simply not be handled on the local level.
that may happen when many separate countries merge their candidate pools to form a single parliament, and its up to the parties to distribute their seats - I would think that an exact representation of members from all countries within the available seats for the party would be hard to achieve, though.
> Moving power further away from the electorate should be a last resort for issues that can simply not be handled on the local level.
This is true to some extend, however you have to somehow ensure that all individual pieces work in a collaborative mode and support each other, because once you get in competitive mode, its a race to the bottom for everyone.
I don't understand / buy that argument. I find it quite neo-liberal in the sense that it assumes countries will deterministically mindlessly engage in a race to the bottom.
The "prisoners dilemma" is a problem of course. But people and countries can and do cooperate despite that.
For this reason, it's not clear to me that EU countries would automatically slash their environment regulations and corruption prevention efforts in a "race to the bottom" if the EU wasn't there stopping them.
Democracy gets diluted when the electorate becomes too large and too diverse. It's important that decisions stay as local as possible.
Like, image some county that needs energy, has no natural gifts regarding that but has land to farm upon. Instead of exporting food and importing coal from somewhere to fire up a new plant, it could also exchange energy with a more gifted county that has plenty of green energy but doesn't need something from them.
To make this work, a higher level entity can force the exchange, and ensure that the whole area doesn't suffer from pollution despite that being the cheapest or even only possible way for the individual county. It COULD be solved there, but everyone is worse off by not cooperating.
Actually, the EU has a huge power potential if only the member states would finally cut back on individual national interests so that mutual agreements and shared legislation/taxes/military/... could be setup properly - which might worse some situations in the short term, but ensures greater wealth for everyone longterm. The "I I I" egoistic thinking of individual member states is the greatest weakness the EU has - unified we can achieve so much more!
I'd be more fine with that if they only regulated narrowly defined inter-state issues in the EU.
But stuff like this... There's no mandate. And there's no reason this couldn't be done locally in every member state where the population wants that.