Secondly I don't recall voting for any MEPs, as far as I can tell it's similarly not reported on. Besides given the lack of news about what any of the parties are up to it's hard to say anything about who you should even vote for.
Thirdly just because somewhere at the end a vaguely democratically elected group of people get to make a decision about it that doesn't somehow absolve the rest of the process from being undemocratic and seemingly driven by corporate interests. The biggest problem being that the decisions on what should be voted on and how seem to be mostly taken by an unelected group of people, who will evidently (given the way Selmayr was promoted) vote for anything if it gets them better pay and pensions.
This is definitely a deficiency of your local press.
> I don't recall voting for any MEPs
Elections are held every 5 years and organised by your local electoral authorities? Which country are you in and are you a national or a resident?
So that's one, in my opinion very big problem.
Second, people are just not aware of what power the EU has. And the politicians I speak to actually see this as an advantage. One told me specifically that without power like this we would still have the insanity of driving on the left of the road in Norway, or would still have the separate currencies (which of course, would also have prevented a lot of problems in Greece, Italy, Spain, Ireland and Portugal, and provided better lives for probably 100 million (!) people).
So that's the second part. Nobody cares about the EU, because there is no unity. Europeans don't feel part of Europe. They feel they're part of France, Belgium, UK, but not of Europe. So they don't care. There is little to no local presence of any EU agency.
Where do you live if I may ask? here in austria it was everywhere before the vote and now new articles with the result.
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/elections2014-results/en/turno...
despite claimes on election night that turnout had (very slightly!) increased over the previous election
https://www.politico.eu/article/this-time-its-different/
Election turnout falling consistently as the elected body's powers increase consistently. Not great.
1) You could argue whether the EU Parliament has democracy deficits or not. I assume it has (based on the legislation process itself with involvement of the Committee, but also based upon unequally weighted votes of citizens from different countries).
2) However, the most important point is that this law is considered as a "techie niche" by the vast majority of citizens. Also, EU topics as such suffer from a very narrow attention in the general public. Having said this, it is far easier for lobbyists to place such an initiative "under the radar" than it would be to lobby in 28 countries. In techie speak, a centralized entity like the EU is more or less a single point of failure for the unavoidable "bugs" of a democracy.
Not rly an MEP problem I think. Most people don’t care that much.
People are constantly overwhelmed with choices, and eventually they start to economize on their decision-making to focus on immediate needs. Certain systems (particularly those designed by marketers and politicians) are set up to take advantage of this trait.
