Comment by Pazzaz
2 days ago
The citizens do have a say: they vote in elections. This is a temporary law that was implemented 5 years ago so everyone had a chance to vote in the 2024 EU election and vote out those who supported this law. But most people don't care if a company like Meta is allowed to scan their messages. For those who care, they can always use an encrypted messaging service like Signal or Telegram.
Yeah, right, this is just complete bullshit. Let's just put it this way: so, given that you more aware than "most people", did you at least vote against those who support it, and did you try to persuade your friends to do that, but they just didn't listen?
I really don't feel like I can affect anything at all. First of all, even if we assume for the sake of argument that voting for MEPs is important, it's really hard to judge what you are voting for. It's not like they come with clear agendas that people carefully evaluate before they decide how to vote. It's a long running joke how USA elections are choosing between "a giant douche and a turd sandwich", and whatever you choose doesn't even matter because they won't keep their promises, but, hey, at least everyone knows their promises. This one is blue, that one is red, both will let you down in the end, but you kinda know what their general vibe is. Voting for MEPs on the other hand — they are all kinda grey and I couldn't tell you how'd they vote on this particular issue. Depends on your country, but in my case many of them simply weren't MEPs on 2023 vote. And I'm kinda surprised by some of the choices.
Second, I don't really feel that MEPs are that important. They impact almost nothing. All real work is done behind the closed doors by some unknown people, and half of them all happen to be Maltese for some reason (0.1% of EU population, by the way). Parliament in the majority of cases just votes "for all good things and against all bad things" and the actual things that will come to haunt us are usually some small details in the Appendix that were never even explicitly put on the vote.
And when MEP's vote does matter, well, we get something like in this case. The majority objected, but that doesn't matter.
By the way, a couple of years ago I was asking myself, how could it be that we choose von der Leyen to be the President of EC? Well, I don't think we ever did. I surely didn't. MEPs barely did. Never once in all of the history EP rejected a candidate proposed by Council. Whatever each member of the Council did we'll never know, this is not disclosed. And to add the cherry on top, in this particular case it was a record number of MEPs who actually voted against her. It doesn't matter. Here we all are.