I find it somewhat disturbing that this sort of thing is not considered a career killer for politicians.
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Then why did so many vote extremist anti EU? There just has been EU election in germany and the nationalist gained a lot. And none of the big parties otherwise said a clear no to that, so what could I do, except vote a small party against that, but too small to really do something?
Voters care. But they see often no point in voting anymore.
* a 71 year old lady, with no social media and no public speeches ever.
* a guy who used a nickname for his last name, that matched with a military general (who is well known), and many people thought he was the general
* a "journalist" that was caught twice talking on live TV, conversing with a pre-recorded video
* a convicted criminal
It's impressive to manage to fail as a politician.
YouTube prankster voted in as Cyprus MEP - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4nnrwr72dqo
Unlikely—this would actually benefit people.
Before CA, the received wisdom was that if you do something bad, you will need to resign before you are pushed for causing damage to the organisation reputation and therefore electability. This was perhaps borne out with enormous error bars by focus groups and polls asking "would you still vote for X in case of Y".
After CA, and in particular the live social media sentiment data that was gathered around the debacle of the UK Brexit referendum, the data showed that actually egregious misbehaviour did not materially affect sentiments, and perhaps even appealed to a larger proportion of people than believed. For example, the famous "shy Tory" might not show up well in a focus group, but it all hangs out after analysing Facebook's data.
With that data in hand, people started doing things that they would never have dared to do before, knowing that it won't actually harm them, at least in the short run (since this data only shows short term effects).
And that's how we go from resigning over fairly small gaffes to the "screw it, what you gonna do, we know you won't vote for the others, we've seen your data" of today.
Not long ago, calling a woman a bigot on a hot mic was a dreadful PR disaster. Now, you can physically snatch a journalist's phone and it barely registers.
It does, however stack up over time with catastrophic final effects, much like chasing only quarterly figures or always postponing dealing with technical or real debt.
There are many nationally disgraced politicians seating in the EP, EC or council. Only the ones in the EP were electible.
The people have correctly identified that a massive supranational unaccountable government is the problem, enabling corrupt people to keep ruling which undermines the core functioning of representative democracy.
Here in France, the "extremists" got a bit over 30% of votes. But turnout was only 51%.
According to [0] average turnout is 51%. Some countries have very high numbers (IIRC voting is mandatory in Belgium?), others ridiculously low. This, to me, means pretty much that "voters don't care".
But it won't benefit if they say it's to fight the terror or protect the children?
If you really think that spying is OK, if they have "good enough" excuse, no wonder we get all this shit enacted.
However, the problem is that she is not a politician and she has no public presense whatsoever.
She was chosen by her party, and eventually elected because her last name starts with A which put her near the top of the ballot paper.
- https://id-party.eu/program/ (ID Party Official Site)
- https://idgroup.eu/news/online-censorship-is-a-threat-to-eur... (ID Group News)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_and_Democracy (Wikipedia Overview)
- https://id-party.eu/declaration-of-antwerp/ (ID Party Official Site)
The ID group is opposed to EU-wide surveillance measures, and promises to protecting individual privacy and national sovereignty.
64.78%, or over 40 million in absolute terms.
Like the parties (again, here in Germany, don’t know enough about other countries) that manage to be even more corrupt? That actually supports my point. The biggest winners here were the anti-EU-pro-Russia AfD and the pro-EU CDU both with the biggest corruption scandals in recent years, and the CDU is even the party that sent the horror that is EU commission president von der Leyen.
So, even if they might not be explicitly elected to be in the EU governance, most of them have reached that spot through more or less democratic means. "More or less" because Prime Ministers are usually nominated not elected, but that's still as part of each country's democratic process.
Representative democracy works better with increased locality, where policy and politicians are directly beholden to constituents.
Obviously, yes.
That really depends on your point of comparison. Compared to their 22% high in February, they lost a lot with 16% actual votes (more than 25% down). 84% voted something else.
https://interaktiv.tagesspiegel.de/lab/europawahl-2024-sonnt...
Not terribly different from how prime ministers ate appointed.
Would you want to deal with those voters as, effectively, your boss?
People (including me) doesn't want to bother with voting when the whole thing is a farce - it's beyond my understanding why would someone be enticed to vote for incompetent politicians who get parachuted into EU parliament to earn hefty wage - very often as a reward for outrageous behavior, there are multiple examples of this, influencer from Cyprus, that polish MP who got expelled from Poland's parliament for outrageous behavior - surprise surprise - he got comfy EP seat. Absolutely disgusting.
Though, as to the point I think you're actually making, it's also been made very difficult to object to these things in any terms that could possibly have an effect without being thoroughly denounced as a nutter, an extremist, or worse. After all, the "right" thing to do is always to simply "vote!".
This is simplistic. Some have simply lost confidence in their representatives and/or cannot find a decent candidate.
Seems like only the Greens, the left and within ID the AFD voted against.
That is one of the issues, no EU election would have changed what the commission is doing at all.
It lately became en vogue to deny the problem completely and EU politics only got dumber from that.
Before that change, a scandal in the papers also meant you had to have lost political favour with the people who owned the media companies, ie, were losing big political battles. You also had no hope of being re-elected through a hostile media because if they didn't carry a favourable message there was no way to communicate with voters. I'd argue people like Jeffery Epstein never really made it to trial or public attention because stories got buried.
Afterwards the better approach is to point and shout "Fake News". There are multiple channels that reach voters and it turns out that the corporate media are actually much more unreliable and unpopular than were previously suspected. A lot more dirty laundry is aired and the Streisand effect takes hold.
CA wasn't the change, it was just one of the first big scandals to happen in the new era.
And to be clear, I don't mean that the exposure of CA was the cause, I mean that what CA and their ilk was delivering to their customers - detailed, real time, granular analysis of the reactions to actions.
Some time a bit before the public CA exposure would have been when analysts looking at the data delivered by CA would have first realised just how little what would until then have been "scandal" actually moved the needle of their supporters, without having to infer from slow and inaccurate techniques like polling and focus groups.
The parliament, i.e. the majority, i.e. these people, are also the ones who appoint the judges of the top courts of the country, which all but ensures their immunity.
Their immunity is also enshrined in the consistution[4, article 86] - only the parliament can take an MP to the courts, but guess who controls the majority
Also, they are in the pockets of the local oligarchic mafia [1]: A few families that control the vast majority of the media AND the big construction companies AND the energy companies. They are also the ones that own big part of the shipping industry in Greece. For their sake, back in 2022 when the EU was considering to ban oil shipments from Russia, Greece vetoed that [2]
Oh, and just to be safe, the oligarch's tax exemptions are written in the constitution[4, article 107]
So, the people in the government have an almost complete immunity from everything, which makes them extremely arrogant.
If you add to that mix the total disregard of public services, even hospitals during the pandemic, you get a very beautiful-to-look-but-terrible-to-live-in failed state.
A state that even the EU can no longer turn a blind eye on[5]
[1]: https://newrepublic.com/article/159252/noor-one-vampire-ship...
[2]: https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/11/23/how-greek-companies-and...
[3]: https://rsf.org/en/country/greece
[4]: https://www.hellenicparliament.gr/UserFiles/f3c70a23-7696-49...
[5]: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20240202IP...
Would happily work with voters to figure out a path forward.
If I see any issue with the way EU passes laws is with the terrible overhead of having three to four bodies that govern the whole process, from proposal to legislature, not necessarily with the way some participants get there.
I dunno. I kinda do think voters are the problem. Or at least a link in a chain of problems, the next link up being corporate controlled media.
Well for one because people already vode with the head of state in mind when choosing the party. Even if they were aware of the EU politicians of said party (which is never part of the campaign materials) then they now have even more things to compromise on with a single vote.
> If I see any issue with the way EU passes laws is with the terrible overhead of having three to four bodies that govern the whole process, from proposal to legislature, not necessarily with the way some participants get there.
Actually that's the EU's saving grace. The more people are affected by new legislation the more difficult and slower it should be to push that legislation through. The EU should be slow moving but instead we are constantly in a situation like this where bad laws are not far from being passed.
Maybe I'm thinking too hard about the problem, but my impression is that the role of the head of states in the Council is to represent to the best of their abilities their own countries. In that, there's nothing to compromise on when a citizen votes. If you think that person is the best to head your state, it tracks that they can do that once in the Council's chambers. I understand this can sound naive, but meh, European politics is already pretty complicated, having yet another corps of people that needs to be voted democratically feels like it adds another snag in the existing democratic process. And personally I strongly believe that anything that can be done to make it easier for citizens to materialize their democratic options the better for their nation and the EU.
I think Europe as a whole (alongside many other nations, really) suffers from having a disenfranchised and apathetic majority that prefers not to participate in elections, because they don't find representation, because it's an inconvenience, because "what's the point?", etc. All of these paper cuts lead to the results we see today after the EU parliamentary elections ended: more and more support for divisive politics. A better democratic process would drown these voices in the vast majority of moderate people in my opinion, and that's what we should strive for.
Having semi-elected officials as Councilmembers is such a small inconvenience in front of that.
Anyway, sorry for the long(ish) rant. To sum it up, I think the solution to assholes representing their countries in the EU Council is not yet another democratic process, but making it easier for everyone to cast their vote, so extreme options are less likely to crop up.
One place that tries to do it better in my opinion is Switzerland. It has a lot of controls to reduce the ability of politicians to act poorly and limits the power of higher levels (if something can be resolved well locally, there's no need to have a higher-level regulation). A lot of process is thought through and in place to enable direct voting on issues. Additionally, it has many levels to get engaged, which lowers the barriers to entry, by being able to have an impact on a local level.
I live this reality and have family in law enforcement. You might not want to believe it but it's absolutely the truth on the ground. We need to control our borders much more strictly.