But the plans were on display…”
    “On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”
    “That’s the display department.”
    “With a flashlight.”
    “Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.”
    “So had the stairs.”
    “But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?”
    “Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.

Douglas Adams wasn't far off.

The interesting part with the EU is that all policy (proposed and accepted) is actually all organized, findable and out in the open on the internet (and even translated to all official member state languages IIRC)... if you have the mindset of a bureaucrat and know the system.

I know because my ex did European Studies and knew how to navigate those websites. I for the life of me cannot figure out how she did it if I try now.

EU website makes the IBM and HP websites seem user-friendly and easy. I tried engaging with some of the Open Source stuff a few years ago, and I definitely felt like I needed a "European Studies" PhD to be able to navigate all of that.

TBF, when my former partner explained the system to me, it did feel like a lot of the complexity was inherent to the problem of what the EU as a project is trying to achieve. It is not a trivial problem to solve.

Another issue is basically the legal analogy of how certain difficult programming languages impose a selection bias on who actually is willing to learn it, which then leads to an echo-chamber culture where most people underestimate the issues with the programming language.

A really good friend of mine created the first version of eur-lex.europa (hopefully it's that one, it was a website for lawyers to find European legislation and case law), he barely finished his first internship at the time, only had one true web project on his belt (and two weeks of intensive formation), and was spectacularly underpaid (not for his inexistant qualifications, but for the work he did).

I thought he did a good work, but I was a student too so maybe I was just impressed with basic stuff (highly likely).

Sounds like it might be a good web-scraping project for a civic-minded group or individual: scrape the sites, unify and organize them into something more approachable and discoverable.

I know in the US we have orgs like Code for America and events like National Day of Civic Hacking. Does the EU have similar groups and events? I wonder if this could be presented to something like that.

As someone else said, sounds like an interesting project to scrape, organize, and somehow "re-surface" that data in a much more accessible manner (how? I don't know; I've never done such a project before).

Obviously it should be said that such a project shouldn't be needed in the first place in an ideal world, but it does sound like something I might be interested in chipping in regardless (and a great learning opportunity).

I am the last person to suggest throwing AI at a random problem, but this actually sounds like a good match for LLM training/prompting...

It's sad, but this actually happened.

There was an episode of the Mark Thomas Comedy Product where he describes how they were trying to find the spending habits of EU MPs, but they were in a basement with no electronic devices allowed, so they hired an army of students to run up and down with notebooks and pens and relay all the information to more students upstairs who had to type it all up and put it online.

The worst part is that this is still better than how most governments currently work. At least there is a chance to give feedback.

Also, keep in mind that this is in the context of getting all member states of the EU to agree on something. People kicking up a fuss is the default situation because of conflicting interests between different states.

Make no mistake about how I feel about this though: it's still pretty horrible even with that context in mind. And as graemep pointed out the rest of the quotes on that page will tell you all you need to know about Juncker too.

I think the worst part is, that most governments work like this, but only some can dare to speak about it in the open. Now why could Juncker speak so open? Probably because he is quite disconnected from the democratic election process ..

I mean, I certainly did not vote for Ursula von der Leyen either.

Your representatives that you voted into parliament did, however.

She was nominated by the European Council (=Heads of gov't of EU countries) because the EU parliament is a divided mess and the leading parties have no internal cohesion whatsoever. Parties at the european level are disparate coalitions between national parties and MEPs follow the national party line. The decision was made by national governments and rubber-stamped by the parliament.

This is fundamentally different from how a PM is voted in a traditional parliamentary system where an MP leads the party during the election process and elected as PM after a clear victory or negotiations between MPs.

Having a prominent MP leader like that is one of my second least favorite part of parliamentary governments[1]. Politics and governance aren't so simple that one person will ever be found that fairly represents the majority of the populace because the majority of the populace can't agree on multiple things. It's better for the majority of the power in governments to be devolved down to MPs voting on matters with the executive branch just being a formality for PR on the local and international stage - as well as being entrusted with emergency powers if we ever need to get anything done.

We're a people with a wide spectrum of beliefs - we should be represented by a wide spectrum of MPs... never by a single voice.

1. My first being whenever a single party actually wins a majority.

> We're a people with a wide spectrum of beliefs - we should be represented by a wide spectrum of MPs... never by a single voice.

This is a fair statement. I'm not from the EU but I think it's true for basically any society. Also a lot of the dysfunction in the EU is obviously by design and it's supposed to instill cooperation and deliberation between different stakeholders.

Still, in politics "getting things done" is very important, imo much more important than representation because the main job of a government is to govern and a fairly balanced government that fails to govern will lose support very quickly and become unrepresentative/useless. Also if someone can't get things done, others will do it and force their hand, like the case of the election of the EU commission president. Or practically everything the UN does.

The good thing about a government by a single party or a well defined coalition is that you know what they roughly stand for, what they don't stand for, who is for them and who is against. You can support them or vote against them. In an election one side wins. Being an incumbent is difficult so in the next the other side wins, they are supposed to balance each other that way.

What is the alternative of a de facto coalition between the right, center-left and liberals? Which of these is really in power? Who are you going to vote for if you don't like where the things are headed?

Looking at the EU parliament (or the parliaments of many EU countries) the main alternatives are fascism-lite and actual fascism. That's the risk of plethoric supranational governing bodies like the EU or very large coalition governments, they rob people of viable democratic alternatives.

I think you pointed the defining aspect here. Having many opinions is inefficient but representative. Having one winner is efficient but lopsided. You can't have the cake and eat it, so each society had to decide which way (and revisit the decision over time).

Von der Leyen is President of the European Council. The parliament had nothing to do with it.

The council is made up of the prime ministers of the EU member countries, which also were not voted for seats in the EC.

Likewise there was no vote on the Lisboa treaty which effectively put the EC above the parliament and outside its jurisdiction.

I was not very clear on what I meant, sorry for that.

I meant that whatever the government metaphorical "you" voted in, has voice in EC.

In fact current Lisboa treaty came into effect after previous reform attempt was torpedoed in part for "taking away sovereignty" by giving more power to European Parliament vs European Council - where the national governments have power.

The „same opinion as“ operator does not distribute over the transitive equality relation

Which is relevant to his/her point (about not being able to vote on people directly), because?

How would you know, who I voted for?

> People kicking up a fuss is the default situation because of conflicting interests between different states.

In some cases less between the states and more between gonvernment and people. The european parliament is elected by the people. But many important matters are defined by the comission consisting of representatives of the member states governments.

Of course the different governments are also elected. But as part of the comission they can act against the will of the people and later blame the EU.

"When it becomes serious, you have to lie'"

    - Jean-Claude Juncker

Wow, a lot of those quotes are damning.

Doubt it is a particularly unbiased sample though, so probably not a good idea to draw any strong conclusions from reading it.

“it is a historic mistake to not want to tax at the appropriate levels the profits of multinational companies which act globally and don’t pay the taxes they owe.”

  - Jean-Claude Juncker ...Prime minister of ....Luxembourg

Mr LuxLeaks said that eh?

I mean, I'm not saying Juncker is great, just that reading the random collection of quotes on wikiquotes might not be the best way to judge his work.