> Your talking points are misinformed and pretty ridiculous which makes me think you're a troll rather than having a faithful argument. But on the off chance you are trying to have a real discussion: The Council and Parliament both get elected and the commission cannot do anything without them, so it's not like the system is not democratic.

No, I really believe everybody with a shred of power in an office needs to be elected, especially at the EU level where their decisions can affect hundreds of millions. Again, second- or third-hand democracy is not really democracy.

> I don't see the US asking for their attorney general or supreme court justices to be democratically elected. At some point you have to trust that the people you actually elect will appoint people who know what they're doing.

Well, maybe they should. And should also limit their mandates from life to maybe 4-8 years. And no, it does not mean that if I vote for someone I will trust that someone completely. They will, at some point, take some decisions that are contrary to my interest but in their own political interest. So they do not really have a desire to represent me fully, just enough.

> Just because there's someone in the chain you're not doing a round of elections on doesn't make the system bad. You need the system to have agency at some point.

No, they need to be voted in. This is how we get in situations where unelected officials, like the EU commission is, make decisions that affect my life without any consequences for them.

The system needs to be tied to the people's wish at every corner, and if the people don't like someone, they should be able to vote them out on a recall vote just as easy as ordering pizza.

I would like to see a system where confidence votes are cast every six months or so for everyone (parliament, president, prime-minister - you name it). And if they fail, they get booted out the next day and fresh elections are held in the next two-three weeks. And the cycle repeats. Either they work for the people to keep their jobs or not. Super simple.

Confidence votes are a very different type of vote than electoral votes. There’s an argument to make for them. There’s also an argument that it turns a professional job into a popularity contest.

I know it sounds like the commission is full of buddy-buddy jobs but, living in Brussels and seeing the bubble from up close I can tell you that is seldom the case. I can’t say it never happens but the processes and scrutiny these people go through is extremely high.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s often a lot of incompetence that ends up at the helm. But this isn’t something elections solve. Elections turned the leader of the free world into the leader of incompetence.

Adding elections adds democracy, it does not add expertise. If your issue is with bad decisions being made, your issue is not with how the people got in the position to make those decisions, it’s with the systems that allowed bad decisions to be made.

A bad plane pilot can crash your plane and kill you; the fix isn’t to elect your pilots.