I don't know where you are from, but at least in Slovenia if you see someone running for EU parliament you know he is basically retiring from politics.

EU parliament has no actual power, EU is basically ran by EC and ECB.

There has been plenty of movement between the EU parliament and the national parliament in Finland.

As an institution, the EU parliament has real power. It's just that citizens are not particularly interested in what it does, and the media consequently does not report that much about it.

The core issue is that being a MEP looks like a career dead end to an invididual politician. While national MPs have less power, they enjoy more media attention. And if you are an MP for a major party, you have a real chance of becoming a minister. The same pathway does not work in the EU parliament, because commissioners are nominated by national governments rather than selected from MEPs.

I don't know why people expect EU to be some kind of strong do-it-all central government. Maybe it's a side effect of looking from far away like we look at China. But it was always a loose confederation with members retaining most of the power.

In the UK, before we (sadly) left, being an MEP was a bit of a joke, where being an MP was a much bigger deal. Maybe other countries are different, but nobody who wanted to rise through the ranks in the UK would opt to be an MEP over an MP, and I suspect that’s very similar in many other member countries.

> 1. EU is the most aggressive when it comes to legislation far exceeding the US in terms of privacy law, competition law and setting strict minimums for labor conditions etc.

The problem is in practice those big law and regulations end up benefiting the biggest actors with "Star Destroyers" type legal departments and lobbying.

I have witnessed it, 10 years ago GDPR pushed most European companies in one of the hyperscaler cloud. Exactly the opposite of what we were naively expecting. The EU Cyber resilience act is finishing up the job.

Funny how now just because Trump was elected, some European are waking up wondering why they are in this mess and welcome more EU regulation to get them out of there...