Our leaders are sometimes spineless, so I unfortunately can't be certain.

I am however pretty certain that said spinelessness wouldn't fly with the European public.

Doesn't really matter since the European commission is not voted by us - we have no choice in the matter.

The European commission is nominated by our elected governments.

It is as democratic as the US presidency, which is also nominated by electors.

This is a tired talking point designed to sow doubt in the European project.

Adding layers of indirection makes it less democratic. We should be able to vote for them directly.

Sure it does.

But one layer of indirection is not crazy, that's the way any minister in any country works - or the way the US presidency does.

You can't directly elect every single official - it just doesn't scale. It also doesn't really make sense in the commissioner case as different commissioners have different portfolios and which country gets what is subject to negotiation between member states.

I mean, it's _possible_ that they had some sort of informal pre-approval, but given that Apple's last few 'attempts' to comply with EU law have swiftly been met with a "yeah, no" from the commission, there's not that much reason to think that _this_ one is the pre-cleared one.