The commission needs a passing vote of approval from the parliament and its president is elected by the parliament. It is a democratic system.

Additionally the Parliament can request the Commission to submit a legislative proposal, and the Parliament can dismiss the Commission at will with a vote of no-confidence. So de-facto it does have some legislative initiative ability, and it is not much different from other legislative systems where the vast majority of the laws are proposed by the Government.

With time the EU Parliament has seen its powers increasing, and there is reason to expect it will continue to do so.

It's not a democratic system and would be easily recognized as such if it were implemented anywhere other than Europe.

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.

> They could literally vote for von der Leyen or not vote at all.

that's how confidence votes work on most parliamentary republics.

I think a key difference is that in parliamentary republics, we usually now how the candidate (that the parliement votes on) has been chosen: it's usually by winning the elections as the head of the party with the most parliement seats. In this case, the process is completely opaque. I would say that it would be pretty weird if people say, here in Canada, voted for their MPs (good!) but then said MPs could only choose between an arbitrary list of candidates to be Prime Minister, chosen in a private meeting with 0 explanations.

In systems where you don't get single party majorities, do you _really_ how and what the coalition members traded to reach a deal?

It wasn't a confidence vote, was it?

The fact that there's a vote at some point of the system doesn't make it democratic. Most authoritarian regimes require some people to vote, but they're not democratic.

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...