Comment by 73738384
1 day ago
The European Comission is the top decision maker of the EU. The European citizen has zero (0) influence on the members or actions of the EC. No different than the politburo in China.
1 day ago
The European Comission is the top decision maker of the EU. The European citizen has zero (0) influence on the members or actions of the EC. No different than the politburo in China.
That is incorrect. Usually, the legislation happens in the trilogue, which is an abomination and everything but well representing it's citizens interest, but the Commission can do very very little if the council says no. That again is a body consisting of elected officials with varying degrees of distance from a direct election. Best example for a change: everything that happened after Magyar replaced Orban in the council. This is just to say... Its complicated. The EU can definitely do with a reform and better, stronger democratic legitimacy.
It is slightly different than China, China has implemented hotlines/apps for citizen complaints in response to social pressure, and it actually attempts to address those complaints.
https://citizens-initiative.europa.eu/index_en
This is for proposing legislation, not fixing local quality of life issues, and the success rate has been rather poor. China’s system has a broad scale, but is directed at local problems and has a very high success rate.
As I understand it, many of the issues faced by petitioners in the past were due to local corruption; officials would physically prevent petitioners from traveling to the petition office to deliver a complaint. The new systems (12345, 12388, and the apps) are intended to bypass that and have done a decent job at reducing corruption.
The Citizen’s Initiative is more of a referendum system for proposing bills, but due to its non-binding nature those bills are often ignored. China’s system doesn’t necessarily bind the government to action either, but given the small scale of the problems they are motivated to fix them.
This does not excuse China’s human rights abuses, but if you’re going to be abused either way, I can see why some would prefer to do it in a place with a rising standard of living and with a government that seems interested in improving.
While you can use the hotline in private, you can't object to any matter in public.
From what I can tell, there are many issues that aren’t off limits to criticize on Chinese social media. In fact, recurring social media complaints are what spurred development of the hotline system.
It’s mainly complaints that are considered sensitive or destabilizing that are suppressed. This should sound familiar to those of us in the West. Germany actually goes farther by directly funding left-wing protest groups, as these are not considered destabilizing.
Given a choice between China and the EU at this point I would choose to live in China.
ok lol objectively poor choice but go right ahead
2 replies →
Apart from the fact it can't make decisions.
It can only propose; the decision is made by the EU parliament.
fortunately I don't think the average EU citizen could name a single member of the EU parliament
Then they should vote better and know who their elected representatives are.
> The European citizen has zero (0) influence on the members or actions of the EC
Whenever one reads EC you need to read: "All of the heads of state in a trenchcoat". Macron, Merz, etc
And yet this is an EP maneuver
And let's not forget on the American lobbyists pushing for it (Including Big Tech)
It’s a maneuver between the council and EPP