The leaders of Cyprus, France, Greece, Italy, Malta, Portugal and Spain have said EU citizens should have more say on EU policy to combat populism.
They said in a joint statement at a summit in Rome on Wednesday (10 January) that so-called 'citizens' consultations' were needed to "foster democracy and citizens' participation."
The lack of democracy and citizens' participation is a feature and not a bug of the EU as I've noted for a long time:
The [EU] elites are pretending that the public is bloodthirsty and that only erasing democracy in a smothering European bureaucracy can prevent future bloodshed.
Imagine that, the Europeans looked to their past, noticed that the rulers of Europe often rallied their publics into repeated wars against each other and the rest of the world, and concluded that the key failure in this is their own public that failed to stop the leaders! Never mind that it was the leadership that led Europe to fight. I just want to know how putting an elite that has been prone to war back in complete charge will end European wars? Isn't this recreating the Europe of divine right rulers that created the bloody swath that Europeans cut across the globe?
The participation of France in this statement is kind of funny. For a long time France thought their elites could hold the reins of West Germany and lead the EU from behind.
But a united Germany with the weakened Russians a safe distance away doesn't take to the bit like they once did.
So now France joins with the southern Europeans to raise concerns about the level of democracy in the EU.
Good luck with that.
Although their idea of democracy doesn't seem to include the nation-states of Europe as the basis of that democracy. The French have proposed and their southern partners endorse plan to "create transnational lists of members of the European Parliament for the 2019 EU elections[.]"
Further, is France seriously arguing that transnational parties will increase democracy?
Won't that just dilute the democracy of politicians responsible for their local constituents, thus ratifying the same feature of the EU that subordinates nations to the proto-imperial bureaucracy?
