Comment by joe_mamba
16 days ago
> It’s that the EU is explicitly built against that and if it happens it will come from the national governments (see Hungary)
So to prevent individual EU nations ever becoming authoritarian, like Hungary, we have to cede sovereignty and authority to the EU & EC unelected bureaucrats like Ursula VDL who take over as the main executive leaders, ensuring we'll no longer have the danger of national-level authoritarianism.
Hell of a solution.
Surely the better solution to issues like Hungary is ensuring we get more democracy to Hungarian people, not giving authority over Hungary to someone else the Hungarian people can't elect.
> So to prevent individual EU nations ever becoming authoritarian, like Hungary, we have to cede sovereignty and authority to the EU & EC unelected bureaucrats like Ursula VDL who take over as the main executive leaders, ensuring we'll no longer have the danger of national-level authoritarianism.
Not really, and the example of Hungary shows that it would not be that effective for that purpose.
The EU is a union of nations, not really of people. It was built so that nations play nice with each other. Each member state still does more or less what it wants within its borders, as long as it does not jeopardise the union.
In that way it’s not perfectly democratic, because there are layers of indirection between the citizens and the institutions.
Commissioners are nominated by member states and approved by parliament. So they are generally aligned with the politics dominant at the national level and palatable to MEPs. Von der Leyen is there because she had support from the German government and was from the dominant block in parliament. It’s not direct democracy, but it is not a faceless blob either.
US Supreme Court Judges are not elected. Although I hesitate to use this as an example currently, given how well the US separation of powers is (not) working, the point stands that all democratic systems need some kind of "damping" influence to survive. If successive national governments were hostile to EU bureaucrats there are options open to them to restore sovereignty — e.g. exit the EU, or force change in appointments by coordinating with other EU governments. The fact that senior positions in the EU are unelected does not in itself make the system un or anti democratic.