The parliament doesn't get to choose the laws it has to vote. The parliament can't repell a law, and doesn't hold the pen during negociations.

So the laws that Parliament votes on just appear in session magically? They're not written by EU citizens and politicians?

Yes, European Commission decides the laws. Then a “trilogue” negotiation happens between the Commission, MPs, and EU government representatives, but the MPs don't hold the pen on the final wording (Commission does).

MPs can't therefore repeal laws; they can at most ask the Commission to set themes on the program. The Commission is therefore strongly dominant, as it is composed of career unelected officials who can wait for a compliant Parliament to pass the laws they want and target MPs in negotiations. This is what they do with ChatControl.

Of course there are no checks and balances for the Commission officials, who are bureaucrats with an opaque agenda. The EU is a weak form of democracy, which is geared toward bureaucratic capture and legal inflation.

It's a bit complicated to feed more stability into the system, but then this gets hijacked by national governments as an excuse to never take any blame for any shit that follows. Everything good is us, sovereign entities and all that is bad is always the other people in Brussels. Even zo the people in Brussels are mostly deputies of the same people or just themselves, but 26x.

It's not true, the Parliament can't choose the laws it has to vote on. All negotiations are done behind closed doors, in a truly democratic and transparent manner, that allows us to lecture the rest of the world on how to govern.

The parliament can't choose the laws that are submitted, but it can and does change the text of it all the time. I don't think the actual discussions are ever public in any other modern democratic body anyways.

This isn't exactly true. They can't propose but they can amend. The final text has to be agreed by the commission, the lower chamber (the parliament) and the higher chamber (the council, which is heads of states).

They can't propose, they can amend, but they don't hold the pen, and the Commission can veto it. Seems really democratic, Stalin would be proud!

I'd argue the average EU citizen has absolutely no idea how any of the Brussels bullshit works in reality. We learned it in school once, very briefly, just long enough to learn it is a clusterfuck of chambers. We are told it is democratic, and that's it. Once you get older, all you hear is: Brussels forbids this, forbids that. The EU is ripe for disruption.

Tech companies are ripe for disruption and breakups.