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“Democracy”, European Union version

15 0
21.05.2024

The European Union presents the election of MEPs and the President of the Commission as demonstrations of its democratic character. Yet all this is a shadow play. Most of it has already been discussed elsewhere, and no one has even heard of it. This staging will be enough to make people believe that the play, already written, is only the fruit of the popular will.

As the European Union prepares to transform itself into a single state, its political evolution is taking an authoritarian step.

The election of MEPs promises to be deliberately confused. There are still no political parties at European level, despite the fact that they have been talked about for fifty years and enshrined in the treaties, but only European coalitions of national parties, which is not at all the same thing. These coalitions each present a Spitzenkandidat, literally a "head of list", who is not, however, a candidate for Parliament, nor does he or she appear on any of their national lists. Five of them will be debating their plans to preside over the European Commission in Eurovision. They are :

Walter Baier, European Left ;
Sandro Gozi, Renewing Europe Now;
Ursula von der Leyen, European People’s Party;
Terry Reintke, European Greens;
Nicolas Schmit, Party of European Socialists.

The "Identity and Democracy" group was not invited to this show. This is because the five previous groups have a particular conception of democracy. They consider that Identity and Democracy doesn’t play the game they do, and therefore refuse to debate with it.

This debate will not take place in the studio, but in the hemicycle of the Parliament; a setting that imposes itself. The President of Parliament, Roberta Metsola, took advantage of the fact that the elected representatives were in the middle of an election campaign to grant the producers this set, without informing the parliamentarians. Many would have had their say.

It will take place in English. This is another of the Union’s subtleties: each member state has the right to request that all official documents be translated into a language of its choice. The Union therefore has 23 official languages for 27 member states, i.e. 552 possible language combinations. However, no state has requested that English be one of the languages of the Union. Malta, for example, which has made English one of its two official languages, has preferred Maltese to be used in Brussels. Yet, de facto, English has become the 24th language of the Union, and the only one common to all. This, of course, has nothing to do with the fact that the EU is not a European project, but an Anglo-Saxon one.

Incidentally, this strange debate is of little importance, since everyone knows that the Commission President will probably be chosen from outside this cenacle: it is likely to be banker Mario Draghi [1]. This is not impossible, since in 2019, Ursula von der Leyen did not take part in this debate and yet became President of the Commission.

Don’t get me wrong: Mario Draghi may be 76 years old, but he’s the former governor of the........

© Red Voltaire


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