Germany is not supporting ChatControl – blocking minority secured

Glad we could delay it for now. It will come back again and again with that high of support though. Also the German Bundestag is already discussing a compromise: https://www.bundestag.de/presse/hib/kurzmeldungen-1108356. They are only unhappy with certain points like breaking encryption. They still want to destroy privacy and cut back our rights in the name of "safety", just a little less.

The bigger issue is that we need to make the EU actually democratic. Start by removing every branch but the European Parliament. That's the only solution.

The EU council is formed by the democratically elected member states. This follows an "upper house" approach used in many european countries.

I'm strongly in favor of giving the parliament the ability to propose laws (directives). Currently only the comission can do that.

As an Australian normally subject to two upper houses (the current state I happen to live in is the only unicameral state) that seems very counter intuitive

The way it seems to work in practice (here at least) is most partisan/normative legislation goes through the lower house upwards

And bipartisan (or broadly unpopular or highly technical) legislation goes from the upper house down

It’s more complicated than that, but a one way flow committee sounds extremely restrictive for meaningful reform

A small number of pathways is a good thing, one lone process is probably not (you risk over fitting on both sides)

Edit: Australian legislation has a lot of flaws, but this multimodal setup from my experience is not one of them

I think this is your "intuition" because it is what you are used to, I see no reason why this would be the objectively correct way to do things. The legislative procedure in the EU is a bit more complex than laws simply flowing "up" or "down". There is a trilogue, which is effectively a three-way negotiation between the Council, Parliament and Commission. But ultimately the approval of Parliament and in most cases the Council is required (ie, Commission cannot force laws).

The EU system is also not without its flaws but it's not the worst. Enacting broad, sweeping legislation is cumbersome and difficult which is a feature, not a bug. If we had a more streamlined system we'd probably already have chat control by now.

> There is a trilogue, which is effectively a three-way negotiation between the Council, Parliament and Commission. But ultimately the approval of Parliament and in most cases the Council is required (ie, Commission cannot force laws).

Also EU can't actually make any laws it makes directives that are then up to each member state to implement on their own. It also has no police/military/force to actually enforce that the member states implement the directives. Basically everything is very much about cooperation or finding a compromise everyone can agree on as there is no way to force anyone to do anything really (outside of cutting away EU funding but then the member state can also stop paying their dues which does not work for most of the big states as they pay more then they get back)

The thing where EU has power and actual means to enforce things is the reason it was originally created for. Trade.