Comment by qcnguy
6 days ago
https://x.com/MillennialWoes/status/1893134391322308918
"Because the party groups negotiated with the heads of states comprising the European Council to find a suitable candidate?"
What negotiations? We have no proof any negotiations took place. We don't even know if there was a vote, or if there were discussions, what was discussed, or who the candidates were. The entire process is secret. Think about how mad that is.
"You know, like how all parliamentary systems works?"
No parliamentary system works this way.
"After the election someone has the task of proposing an executive government to the parliament."
There was no election.
"The European Parliament has also rejected commissioners from being appointed. How is that literally being a rubber stamp?"
The head of the Commission before vdL said that both national and Europarl vetos on commissioners are meaningless. They just suggest a replacement who is ideologically identical.
"What most people miss is that the EU functionally has both an upper and lower house, with the upper house being selected from the national elections and lower house from EU wide elections."
You just said it has a single chamber! It really has none because the Europarl can't pass its own laws so it's not a house of representatives, just a room full of theatre kids playacting democracy. The EU doesn't have an upper and lower house by any definition used anywhere in the world. Stop pretending to not understand things.
Do you have proof the negotiations take place before the speaker of a house/king/whatever process proposes a canditate to form the executive branch in a parliamentary system?
> There was no election.
Just stop with the misinformation.
> The EU doesn't have an upper and lower house by any definition used anywhere in the world.
Yes, every country is unique. And the EU moreso due to its history.
> It really has none because the Europarl can't pass its own laws so it's not a house of representatives, just a room full of theatre kids playacting democracy.
It is just the chamber that accepts the proposed commmission, and has the decision to unilaterally force a no-confidence vote if the commission does not propose the laws the chamber wants.
Yes we do have proof of such negotiations. Political parties often use elections internally to select their leaders, those campaigns are public, and then they may spend months negotiating between themselves based on their publicly stated stances in order to form a government, or in more direct non PR systems, just take power directly if they win a majority. The resulting coalitions or governments are explainable. The EU Commission isn't and it's deliberately so.
>The current Commission is the von der Leyen Commission II, which took office in December 2024, following the European Parliament elections in June of the same year.
And those Europarl elections had no influence on who became leader of the Commission, did they, so why are you bringing them up - this seems like the kind of obfuscation the EU regularly relies on. Make noises that sound like what happens in real democracies and hope nobody notices that key links in the chain have been severed.
> Yes, every country is unique. And the EU moreso due to its history.
The EU is not a country. Its "history" is short and artificial. It could work however the people who constructed it wanted it to work, and they chose a dictatorship. What does that tell you about their intentions?
> It is just the chamber that accepts the proposed commmission, and has the decision to unilaterally force a no-confidence vote if the commission does not propose the laws the chamber wants.
No democracy has a chamber that works like this because that is useless and undemocratic. The Europarl's power to fire the Commission is theoretical. It requires a 2/3rds majority so it was never successfully used in its entire history - the Santer Commission resigned, it wasn't fired. No MEPs have ever suggested firing a Commission in order to get specific policies passed, so MEPs have no influence over policy at all. They can theoretically veto things and then watch the Commission reintroduce it again in a different form, so nobody who cares about policy ever goes into EU-level politics.
The only reason that does not happen in the EU is that we do not have EU wide parties. Therefore the palatable candidate needs to come from somewhere else.
Take Sweden, the only requirement for the prime minister is to be a Swedish citizen without holding any position that would lead to a conflict of interest, followed by the parliament accepting the nomination.
It is only by convention and incentives that one of the party leaders of the government coalition becomes prime minister. Sweden has the past 3 years had the third largest party's leader as the prime minister since that was the one the government coalition found palatable.
> And those Europarl elections had no influence on who became leader of the Commission
Please. Just stop. How can they have no influence on who became the leader of the Commission if they are the one to accept the nomination?
Vote no and it is back to the drawing board for the European Council. Which it was close this time as only 51% of the MEPs voted to accept the proposed commission.
This is just getting ridiculous.
> The EU is not a country. Its "history" is short and artificial. It could work however the people who constructed it wanted it to work, and they chose a dictatorship. What does that tell you about their intentions?
True. It is a tightly integrated union which still haven't merged completely. Somewhere in the grey area.
How can they choose dictatorship if everything is democratic stemming from national and EU wide elections?
> No democracy has a chamber that works like this because that is useless and undemocratic. The Europarl's power to fire the Commission is theoretical. It requires a 2/3rds majority so it was never successfully used in its entire history - the Santer Commission resigned, it wasn't fired. No MEPs have ever suggested firing a Commission in order to get specific policies passed, so MEPs have no influence over policy at all.
This is just getting stupid. Please. The power was not exercised but a commission was forced to resign after become ineffective due to not being aligned with the european parliament.
The money quote from wiki:
> The crisis had compounded the already reduced powers of the Commission in favour of the Parliament's legislative power, the council's foreign policy role and the ECB's financial role. However the change with Parliament was the most profound, the previous permanent cooperation between the two bodies came to an end with the shift in power
I truly want to understand why you hate the EU so much? It seems like you are cherrypicking facts to embellish your view rather than seeing things for what they are.
An evolving democratic system with competing national and union interests.
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