Comments by "Luredreier" (@Luredreier) on "EU Made Simple"
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3:49
I fundamentally dissagree with the idea of not having veto power in the hands of member states.
I do believe that the ability to sanction nations that are promoting undemocratic policies within the nation shouldn't be possible to veto.
Backsliding is a real problem and undemocratic politicians can misuse the veto right in this backsliding process.
But having a veto right for national governments in what should be EU wide law is essential.
Because anything that doesn't work for all members shouldn't be EU law but laws that the individual legislatures of the individual countries should make law or not as they please.
Ideally the individual legeslatures should also decide exactly how to implement laws with the EU formulating the overall principles rather then laws.
4:22
Special rights are important.
It's not ideal with the whole ransom part, but nations need to be able to stop laws that's harmful to them.
And yes, force the EU to make adjustments to remove those harmful elements if needed if the overall proposal is to be made law.
The problem isn't vetoing itself, and qualified majority isn't enough here.
The EU is not a country, and laws should not be made at a EU level just because a majority of EU citizens wants a law.
A majority of EU citizens don't have the experience to know what is or isn't harmful to the minority and without a veto right you end up with a tyranny of the majority at the cost of smaller ethnic groups.
Although I'm a green voter and dissagree with the German decision to block the ban on cars that doesn't stop individual legeslatures from banning them, and instead of removing Germanys ability to block that proposed law the individual legeslatures should do that in my view.
As for Viktor Orbán etc...
As frustrating as that is the problem there is democratic backsliding in Poland, Hungary and Turkey, not that they have veto rights or say in EU and NATO respectively.
The EU should have the capability of enforcing democracy at some level even when democratic backsliding causes autocrats to get the power to use their nations veto rights to hold the EU hostage.
The reform needed isn't to take away Hungarys or Polands ability to veto in general, but to give the EU the capability to sanction or even expell member states that are backsliding.
Certain minimum shared values should be enforceable even despite veto powers.
If conservatives wants to ban abortions or gay marriages or whatever I may think that's wrong of them, but that should ultimately be decided at a national level, with the freedom of movement anyone affected by this at least has the option to vote with their feet and just leave.
But jailing gay people or banning abortions to save lives etc like what's happening in some countries should be a absolute minimum that the EU should not tolerate regardless of who's in power in a given member state.
Different nations find different solutions to how to implement democracy, sometimes these methods don't seem equally democratic.
The first past the post system in France and the UK for instance is something I've been extremely critical of in the past and should be reformed at some point.
But not by the EU.
The EU should enforce freedom of speech and democracy, but the details has to be picked locally.
Likewise with freedom of speech.
In some countries the choice has been to accept absolutely anything like in France with the Muhammad drawings.
In others freedom of speech is intended as a protection from the government and the majority population, not as a right for the majority to bully minorities etc so people are expected to keep a minimum of respect for others at least even if they may still express anything they wish.
So although anything may be expressed there may be consequences after the fact if said expression was meant to cause harm to others.
Both approaches are valid.
But the fundamental idea that you should have the ability to express yourself about any problems in your society without fear.
People shouldn't end up in jail for expressing themselves unless encouraging violence.
At most perhaps a fine or a need to pay reparations to someone harmed by your expression after the fact.
There's so many nuances involved in all of this and the nuances has to be dealt with locally even if the overall idea should be enforceable by the EU in my view.
Qualified majority just isn't enough.
Many ethnic groups are too small to stop laws harmful to them with qualified majority.
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I agree, single representative constituencies are a horrible idea.
Be it for parties or candidates.
Imagine 10 political parties, 9 left leaning ones, and one right leaning one getting 11% of the votes.
Almost 90% of the voters voted left leaning, but their vote was split.
With a two round system you may then get the left leaning candidate (perhaos a far left extremist) with 1 more votes then the third most popular representative (8 of the candidates where moderate left, one far left and one far right), despite the third most popular one being overall closer to the majority of the electorate the electorate then ends up having to choose between the plague and cholera...
Similarly the candidates could be problematic due to national affiliation or any number of other issues.
And votes for individuals tends to devolve into talk about personalities instead of political substance.
No, instead I by far prefer parliamentarianism, in a proportional electoral system.
Any roles needed can then be created and distributed based on needs and qualifications and negotiations and compromises, leading to a generally well rounded outcome with people who's usually somewhat moderate, at least by the standards of their own parties, that has a influence on different areas of politics, and it's generally people that are able to work together.
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@mrmeldrew693
A party having the most voted ruling is not democratic.
Imagine a system where you have a first past the post system with 10 parties running, 8 left wing, a centrist and a right wing party, each party gets 10% of the votes, but the right wing party gets 2 more votes.
Yet 80% of the voters cited for the exact opposite political side, and 90% voted against that right wing party.
It is biggest (with two votes) but almost everyone in the constituency disagree with them.
How the heck can you possibly justify giving a party power just because they have more votes?
In this case the other parties combined have way more seats, so since all of them disagree with the far right it's automatically a loss for the far right to have less then half the seats.
If they where less extreme and possible to cooperate with for the center right or center then you could combine those seats with those of the far right to possibly make a coalition that wins.
But yeah, winning in a multi-party system doesn't mean having more seats then any other party.
The labour party in Norway has had more seats then any other party in every single election since WW2, but they've only had two third of the cabinets, meaning that they've lost plenty of times.
Because being biggest doesn't equate to winning.
Having a combination of parties that combined reaches more then half the seats, or at least has a possibility of reaching more then half on a case by case basis is winning.
Does that make sense to you?
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The idea that bigger nations is better loses out on so many nuances.
For instance, one of the reasons why Europe is better socially then the US is that we are many separate nations and therefore can try to more forms of government and see them fail and then learn from them, while in a federation a central government will enforce what they think is right even if there's better solutions out there.
Also, a bigger population means either a bigger legeslature (making it less capable of actually getting anything done) or more people per representative, meaning that it's less likely that any problems with a proposed law will be detected as there's less likelihood of a representative for those that the law might negatively affect is actually present.
As a example, Norway has 169 seats in our parliament.
While the average number of seats needed for any one of those seats are usually lower our smallest party this term got Into our parliament with less then 5 000 seats.
Why?
Because we have a system that doesn't just distribute seats around the country based on population but also based on land.
Because a city getting 2 or 3 representatives still means that the city is well represented.
But 20 villages getting 1 or 2 seats makes a huge difference in how often one of those villages will actually have someone who knows how it is to live there is represented.
So when there was plans to close one of the hospitals in our northernmost region that has a low population they voted in a representative to speak up for it.
Because the reality is that if it's closed they'll have to cross a mountain to get to a hospital, a mountain that's closed in bad weather during the winter, both on land and quite frankly also for air transport, meaning that they're cut off from emergency healthcare.
Likewise in continental Europe private services like postal services or railway services works well, it's a different story up north.
There a high cost pr ticket or package simply means that the service won't be used enough to be funded.
While goverments have a different monetization model that's more conductive to a small customer base, since they can profit on the growth in the area through a increased tax base even if individual services are running at a loss.
Our farms can't run at a profit at all because w only have 4% of our land suitable for agriculture and a climate that's not exactly conducive for it.
In times of shortage we aren't even close to cover our own needs and during the Napoleonic war we where in a borderline starvation, only helped by Russian food, we had a smaller population back then.
Regardless of what benefits our farmers may get they can never compete with the continental farmers, yet they're a important part of the social fabric and the viability of many of the communities that are needed to keep this country running.
They need protection, but we're always going to be importing food from the continent.
But how is someone from the Rhine valley, a valley with a bigger population then our whole country supposed to understand all of that?
Likewise in the Netherlands they have the opposite problem.
There's so little nature and so many people that pretty much everywhere is close to the little nature that's left, meaning that a huge amount of their agricultural sector is affected by laws about the nitrogen being released.
So they need more time to adapt then other parts of Europe with a lower population density.
Every single part of Europe is unique.
And while I absolutely agree that tighter integration is needed as well as common European solutions to problems.
And I'd like things like a EU army, EU tax etc a federal model just can never be democratic for such a big entity.
Only a confederal model or a supernational one.
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@haldy-p Imagine 10 political parties, one far left, one far right, and the rest are center left (or if you prefer right).
Anyway the one party that's on the far extreme of whatever side you are not on yourself gets 11% of the votes.
The party with the second most votes has 1 more vote then the third most popular party and is on the far extreme on the other side, despite 80% of the voters voting for various parties in the center on the side of the second biggest party.
In a single round election 100% of the power goes to the candidate that's the furthest away from 90% of the electorate.
If there's a two round system you end up with the voters forced to pick between plague and cholera, as neither party firs their more centrist views (center left or right depending on what you'd prefer).
As a result a direct election for a single guy ends up being undemocratic.
Instead by making it indirect through a parliamentarian system you can have parties negotiate.
If an outright jerk is the top candidate from a party they can punish said party by not voting for him or her, and perhaps request someone they can work with.
Or if you end up with the biggest party being on the opposite side of the majority of the voters perhaps the second or third biggest party will get a majority for their candidate.
Either way, you get a compromise that's something most of the electorate and politicians can live with.
If a party or a politician is corrupt then other politicians and the electorate both can punish them in a proportional system.
Non-corrupt politicians can refuse to work with the most corrupt politicians.
And voters can can vote for other parties.
The corrupt politicians will still be a part of the political climate as they'll always have core voters keeping them in the legeslative body, but as their reputation gets tarnished they'll lose power and influence through a reduction in seats and coalition partners both.
A parliamentarian system therefore keeps the leaders in question more accountable then a directly elected candidate can be.
In part because politicians who after all works full time with politics and therefore are more likely to be aware of corruption can hold fellow politicans accountable, even if voters keep voting them in, by simply not joining them in coalitions.
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@jaicotterill5226 Genetics isn't a tree going from a root to a branch, it's way more complicated then that.
Modern humans and several other species left a mark in the genetic makeup of neanderthals and several of the other species, and they left a mark in our genes several times over.
Modern Europeans are made up of multiple different migration waves too.
We have mixed every single year since before humans even arrived in Europe till today.
There hasn't been a single year since then that we didn't mix.
And that's a good thing, and a part of the reason why when the Americas was discovered we survived the American diseases, they often didn't survive ours.
Covid-19 is just another example of why it's vital to keep mixing and introducing mee genetic material to the mix.
Evolution mainly operate on gene segments, not whole individuals.
The exact combination of genes that makes up me will never happen again, and that's a good thing.
But the parts of me that's good will eventually spread, just like the good parts of you, and my Asian and African and American exes etc.
And sure, 90% of what made me, me might be gone, but the parts actually worth keeping will stay, and they will fo so because of the help they'll get from other genes and ideas from around the world.
Otherwise my legacy will die out.
The whole idea about people being "pure blood" or some such nonsense only leads to inbreeding.
My mum and dad are already related at least twice.
Mixing is a good thing.
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Oh my goodness, no.
Single seat constituencies of any kind is harmful.
And so is presidencies.
Basically when you have a single candidate or party in charge with just 1 more vote then the second highest party or candidate you end up with a tyranny of the majority, a alternative that may be the worst candidate or party for the majority of the electorate, yet end up with 100% of the power or influence.
It's just bad due to things like the spoiler effect etc.
No, instead of a "Spitzenkandidat"a parliamentarian approach is far preferable.
Don't pick a candidate picked by the party with the most votes or a candidate with the most votes from the electorate, but instead one that gets a majority of the votes from the legeslative branch, as the politicans from smaller parties there can then negotiate concessions or choose a less controversial leader.
So if the biggest partys doesn't get a majority in the legeslature the second biggest party might get that, but perhaps their candidate is a jerk, but they have another politican that most of the other parties can live with, a moderate, good at making compromises, that person may then be head of state or goverment or both, depending on the needs of the EU.
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@jeromeh7985
The EU is literally in the process of removing that veto right just right now..
And you don't seem to get that a union is a problem for both the people living in it and outside it.
In both a union and a federation the ultimate power goes from the top down.
That's a democratic problem because democracy scales poorly with size.
Europe has a population of about 746 millions and a land area of about 10,5 millions.
So how many people per representative should there be?
How many km between the home of each representative?
How do you guarantee that the representatives actually have lived a life where they know how those they represent actually live?
If you end up with a political class that grow up and live as politicians from birth without ever living as farmers or bus drivers or social benefits recievers or single mums, how do you expect them to be able to represent anyone at all?
Being voted in means jack squat if they don't know what problems those they represent actually have.
On the other hand if you actually have enough representatives to represent all of that for a whole continent then the 3 000 large parliament of China will be dwarfed...
Especially because equal number of voters per representative under such a system would leave huge areas of land unrepresented.
In Norway we have 19 constituencies to our parliament, one of them have 5 seats and just 39 299 voters that voted in our last parliamentarian election.
Their third biggest party had 4 908 voters in total throughout the country, but got a seat in our parliament.
Why?
Because that constituency is huge, our biggest, and it had 3 hospitals, serving people separated into three groups divided by mountains, one of those hospitals where closed, leaving the people between them, including the biggest city in that whole constituency without a hospital whenever the weather is to bad for mountain crossing or air ambulances to pass.
Meaning that pregnant women and people with a heart attack literally can't get to a hospital if the weather is bad.
How can people in our capital, let alone down in the Hague possibly know how it is to live somewhere where a equal distribution of hospitals in distance per square km and between people means people will go without due to terrain and climate?
People can only know that if they're from that area.
A area that's really that hostile to human life, where there's no sun for literally months each winter, where you get storms down from the literal north pole hitting our coasts.
Yet if we had 3 000 representatives like China does the whole constituency wouldn't have a single seat, let alone the 5 we have given them.
A constituency that's already so big that there's two parties other then the one created as a protest against closing that hospital to come first, because people the hospital side of those mountains are unaffected, and some people think other issues are more important, like jobs, or lack of infrastructure or local democracy.
So with 3 000 seats and a population of 745 millions on the continent you'd have 248 000 people per representative, and that would be far from enough, especially for the low population density areas of the continent.
Then imagine just how hard it would be to get 3 000 people to agree on *anything*.
The more people who have to agree, the harder it is to get anything done.
No, the only way to have a democracy where everyone has a say in their own day to day life is if you have more sovereign entities representing a smaller subsection of the population.
Norway with our 5 million people is already on the bigger side of ideal here.
By having these smaller entities having the final say about every topic within their own territory or whatever you di ide them by people can actually get things done and also be fairly representative.
But I'm a green voter in my country.
And pollution doesn't end at the borders.
So I do naturally recognize that there's many problems that can't be solved by individual states alone.
It requires cooperation.
But I believe that it's wrong to try to achieve that cooperation by taking power away from those affected.
Instead it should be achieved through sovereign states cooperating, perhaps through a larger body, but one empowered from the bottom up, not granting power from the top down.
So a confederacy instead of a federacy.
Like what Switzerland had between 1291 and 1798 as a example.
Multiple countries being sovereign does not mean that they can't work together.
There's whole people who make up less then those 248 000 people per representative I mentioned.
The Sami people is a minority in Norway.
They have their own language and culture that's not even Indo-European.
And their population in Norway is less then sixty thousand people.
Europe has 11 countries with a population under 400 000.
And even with that we have many ethnic groups not even represented with their own countries.
A Europe wide democracy would therefore leave many whole ethnic groups, many lifestyles, many cultures, many languages, and many unique situations completely and utterly unrepresented.
And the will of the majority would therefore be a tyranny of the majority.
And any majority decisions on a continent wide level will therefore always be undemocratic the way I see it.
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@thomasmerlin4990 No, I'm against a federal model and in favour of a confederal model.
The difference is that in a federal model the states have some legeslative power unlike in a unitary government, however the federal level supercedes the state level.
Essentially in a federal model the power goes from the top down.
In a confederal model that power goes from the bottom up.
The UN uses a confederal model, and Switzerland used to use a confederal model and used it for centuries before switching to the federal model instead.
The EU is currently using the federal model because compencies where EU law supercedes state laws exists, although it's as close to a confederation as a federation can be, but it is a federation never the less because states cedes power upon joining instead of granting power.
Essentially in a confederation a higher body may be granted power, but it's essentially borrowed by the lower levels and the lower bodies still retains said power and the ability to discard decisions made higher up.
I'm ideologically against any democracy containing too many people that's not using a confederal model, as any federal or unitary state with more then single digit millions of people will run into issues where you can't have someone in the political leadership from every category of people that is being ruled.
Where you don't have politicans that knows how it is to live in a location or in a profession etc.
And therefore decisions are made that's outright harmful to parts of the electorate who due to the size of the electorate can't be properly represented.
Even we here in Norway are having some issues with that despite intentionally skewing our system to favour rural communities and using a proportional system so we unlike the catastrophy that is first past the post doesn't drown out issues.
I believe Norway is a touch too big as a country and would prefer us to split up into smaller units working together using a confederal model, although a federal one might be acceptable for us.
In our last national election we after all did ensure that a issue where about a third of one of our constituencies doesn't have access to a hospital when the weather is bad lead to a representative making it to our parliament, as the third largest party in their constituency, with 4 908 votes (that community had mountains between themselves and both the two hospitals in the constituency that is blocked during winter storms that also makes air ambulances a non-option, meaning that people there doesn't have access to help in case of a heart attack or if they start giving birth early/unexpected if the weather is bad as it often is in that region.
But our electoral system with just 169 seats representing about 5 million people despite being proportional and having good proportionality at a national level among the parties still managed to ensure that this small community could have their issues represented in our parliament.
We're very lucky to have that system even if it meant that my party that's more city based had 110 973 votes for our 3 seats, or 36 991 votes pr seat on average.
(Our national level proportionality doesn't kick in before you get 4% of the total votes in the country as a whole, before that you only get seats proportional to the votes in the individual constituencies)
We can represent 4 908 voters who don't have access to hospital (and unlike some other voters in said constituency considered that issue important enough to change party alignment in our system to a new political party instead of staying with another party making empty promises)
But it's impossible for something like a whole continent to do that.
Either you'd need so many representatives that you wouldn't get anything done and the individual representative wouldn't have any real power anyway, or you would give small communities too much power to the point where larger ones would be underrepresented, or you would have smaller communities underrepresented.
Europe has a population of about 7,4*10^8, the EU current has 705 seats, but let's be generous and say that with more countries joining we'll increase the number of seats to 1 000, assuming a equal distribution of seats between the voters that would leave 7,4*10^6 voters pr seat.
As opposed to the 4,9*10^3 voters behind that representative in my country.
And any way to modify the electoral system to favour rural communities in such a system would mean taking too much power away from other voters.
Even just limiting the numbers to just the current population of the EU instead of the whole of Europe you'd honestly run into the same problem...
You simply can not have a fair democracy with more then single digit number of millions of voters.
A equal distribution of seats between the voters is not fair, and the more voters you have the less fair it is to start favouring sub groups thats small enough to not get their own set if the seats are equally distributed yet different enough that they can't be said to reasonably be represented by any seat that's equally distributed.
Germany is trying with their MMP system, but honestly they're failing.
and Germany is just too large.
And the EU is even worse.
And no, I'm not a EU sceptic that want everything to be done at a national level.
I'm in favour of some shared taxation, a EU army, shared immigration policy, shared markets with shared regulations etc, freedom of movement for Europeans and so one and so forth.
And I recognize the value of the EU in preventing wars in Europe.
But while I don't mind other countries having a influence over each state in Europe I believe as s a principle that the last say should be made at as local a level as possible.
And it's better with individual states that choose to work together in a confederation then with states being forced to work together in a *federation*.
Do you understand what I mean?
Does all of that make sense to you?
And yes, I have very strong opinions about this and strong feelings about it.
I live in Norway, and we've already had laws forced on us due to being part of the EEA that while they might work in high population areas like the Ruhr valley (that I'd a single valley with a larger population then our own country) they simply does not in a low population density area like ours.
And part of why we never joined the EU was that the fishery laws the last two times we voted on the issue was decided by large nations that while having a lot of fishermen also had so many voters pr seat that the people making the decisions didn't realize that they where encouraging fishermen to throw overboard fish that was already caught and dead instead of bringing it ashore, causing overfishing...
As it is fisherman where fishing in Norwegian waters then sailing out to EU waters to throw overboard fish there to avoid issues with the quota then returning to fish more...
While EU waters where being severely overfished, we managed to keep ours somewhat healthy.
In part because we actually had fishermen from small communities in our parliament able to explain what consequences each law would have as well as fishermen who has fished from larger boats able to process the fish on the spot.
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@derdude6214 Well, to put it this way, Norway has a population of 5,5 million, a parliament of 169 members and 10 political parties are currently represented.
There's no minimum requirement for percentage of the votes etc for 150 of the 169 seats.
And those 150 seats are distributed between the 19 fylker we used to have prior to a recent reform merged several of them, we're still using the old subdivision for the elections though.
The seats are distributed both based on population and land to ensure that rural people and minorities are well represented.
If you have 30% of the votes in one of those 19 "fylker" but say 3% nationally you get 30% of the seats from that "fylke".
And then you win seats in various other fylker based on how many votes you get there.
Then we have 19 leveling seats that's kind of like the proportional seats in Germany in that there is a 4% limit to be eligible for those 19 seats and they're won based on all the votes and makes the number of seats pr party more proportional.
But since there's 1 leveling seat pr fylke you still get more regional representatives even if the voters actually getting a party said leveling seat is located somewhere else in the country.
As a result our election results are more proportional then the German MMP system and far more proportional then the British or American first past the post electoral system.
However we're intentionally less proportional then the Dutch system for instance.
The reason for that is that if you take two regions, one with say a city of 100 000 people and a few villages all around that city and compare it to a region with perhaps 80 000 people spread out over 80 different villages the likelihood of that city with 100 000 people having someone representing them in any given election outcome is pretty high, but the likelihood of any of those villages having a representative is low even if those 80 000 voters ends up being worth more then the 100 000 in the city.
And quite frankly if you have 2-3 representatives from that city already and the city took part in choosing some of the representatives that represents those villages anyway you still end up with most political views and experiences and of that city represented fairly often.
You'll have someone who knows how it's like living there.
It doesn't make a huge difference if there's 5-6 representatives from that city.
How it is to live there is still taken into consideration when making policies.
While for those villages even with added power given to their region they'll not be represented most years.
That's the logic behind why you guys use first past the post for some of your seats and proportionality for other seats.
But the difference is that our system doesn't distort the proportionality nearly as much and is better at representing smaller political parties.
Unusually this year a new party won a seat with just 4 908 votes, won because a hospital was going to be closed and that would result in half the population of the region with our Sami minority and the lowest population per square km being on the wrong side of a mountain from the closest hospital afterwards.
A mountain that's impassable in bad winter weather by both car and air ambulance.
Something they obviously where somewhat upset about.
Having our system allows us to have a seat winnable with less then 5 000 votes despite the average number of votes pr representative in Norway being 17 200 and my party having 36 700 votes pr our seats.
This kind of distortions only exists for smaller parties (under 4% of the votes) once you get past that our system is really, really proportional.
And it's proportional between the parties even when rural areas gets more seats.
Basically, the idea that all votes should be equal is inherently undemocratic in my view and inherently favours high population density areas.
Take the Rhine valley for instance.
It has over twice the population of my whole country.
Yet non of them know how it is to live somewhere where private public transportation, private health care, private education, private post services etc simply isn't viable due to low population.
Non of them know how it is to live in a country where only 3% of the land is suitable for agriculture, 1% suitable for grain and neither works most of the year due to the climate...
A country where our last conflict with a naval power literally lead to food shortages and borderline starvation as the Brits where blockading our coast during the Napolionic wars...
And we're even more vulnerable now then then with the increased population...
It would be unfair for those 5 000 or so voters in Norway to actually decide what laws people in the Rhine valley has to live by.
Urban areas should have more power then rural people, simply because we're more people.
But we already do because of our population.
But laws that affect others shouldn't be made by people who don't know the conditions of those who have to live under those rules.
And no representatives from the Rhine valley as a example could ever do so with regards to rural areas in Norway or Switzerland etc.
With veto power you're still able to enforce all of those laws as individual countries, but you're not forcing laws that's not viable onto others.
And for the record, a federated Europe would be inherently undemocratic for the simple reason that it's impossible to make a a large democracy function well.
And a confederate model is the only method that's fair towards everyone.
Federal being a too down model where the highest level grants power down, a confederal model is a bottom up system where the lower levels have all the power and willingly gives some away in specific situationa, but still ultimately has the final say themselves.
We've spent about 500 years in various unions, they didn't work out all that well for us...
No federation or other union is going to be a good option for us for many centuries I think...
But the basic principles still applies.
And I'm not just saying that to benefit us...
Norway is currently in a similar dilemma of our own.
We've (happily) signed treaties and laws that gives our ethnic minorities, the Sami, the Kven, the Forest Finns, the Romani and the Roma certain rights.
That's intended to protect their culture.
In the case of the Sami the ones along the coast and lived of fishing and farming has mostly been assimilated into the Norwegian culture, so what remains is mainly the semi-nomadic raindeer herders living in areas we haven't really been able to utilize much, our highlands etc.
And that raindeer herding is a important part of their culture, and it contributes to keeping their language alive.
The Sami have multiple languages as they're technically not one people but several closely related ones.
The northern Sami culture is thriving.
But the south Sami culture is endangered.
So our government is obligated to take them into consideration when making decisions.
One such decision was granting building permit to build some windfarms on a Norwegian peninsula.
The first ones where built with the consent of the local Sami raindeer herders (but reduced the available winter grazing grounds a bit from what I understand)
Then another permit was given...
This time against the will of the local Sami who took this to court.
The authorities hasn't taken into consideration that unlike our animal husbandry they're not using the same grazing grounds all year round...
And that the raindeers are animals that don't change easily...
They literally walk the same paths for 10 000 years, and the Sami just followed them...
But they're also skittish and often won't cross human roads or walk close to our windmills...
So when our bureaucrats looked at the available grazing grounds and though that's more then enough and gave a building permit when all of those grazing grounds are summer ones except the one being destroyed by the windmills...
Yeah, that didn't fly in our supreme court...
So now our government has ro work out what to do with windmills producing 3% of all our power worth billions of NOK while also following up on the decision by the supreme court that we're violating the human rights of our Sami raindeer herders by destroying those winter grazing areas...
(The original windmills that they consented to is also included as building them meant that the raindeer herders didn't have any winter grazing areas to fall back on, and also because this whole issue caused ethnic tension since there's still people alive who remember the time when the Norwegian government suppressed the Sami culture...)
Anyway, the needs of the many sometimes needs to make way for the needs of the few.
And if you want universal solutions you need the input of *everyone*.
That's why a veto is important...
The only reason why I'm begrudgingly accepting that a alternative is needed is because that veto is being abused by authoritarian leaders who really are not representing their whole people.
If Poland doesn't want to permit gay marriages etc I'll deeply dissagree with the, but ultimately that should be their choice.
Areas where I don't feel like Europe should go along with them though is on basic democratic principles...
They should be allowed to be undemocratic if they want, but not while being members of the EU.
Rule of law, freedom of the press and freedom of speech etc should be nonnegotiable among members...
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@derdude6214 No, local figures is one of my objections to the German system.
Focusing on individuals ends up distracting from the politics.
You get more of a popularity contest instead of voting so much on the direction you want your country to go in.
Our system is 100% party list based.
However candidates can be listed on multiple lists (if said lists permit it), and voters can change the lists in the boot, changing the order, adding people from other parties or removing people, although such changes are only taken into consideration if enough voters for a particular list actually make a change.
But especially in local elections it's common for lists to run on individual policies with members of multiple different parties included while they also run on their regular party list if they wish.
Some autonomy can never be enough.
Especially because it makes the federation vulnerable against a federal level that gets frustrated with local authorities and increase their own power at the cost of the local ones.
Especially dangerous in the case of authoritarian leaders.
No, it has to be the other way around.
Also, a federal level politician can never know what is or isn't important for local governments to decide.
In our case capitalism itself works worse because there isn't a viable market for many services that we still need due to lack of population density.
And that has been a problem in recent years since the EU has been lead by right wing politicians for a long time now, and we've been forced to implement capitalist policies that works fine in the high population density areas of the EU, but just doesn't out here in rural Norway.
Our postal services for instance is significantly worse after the EU decided that privatization of postal services was required...
Likewise train services on some routes have become significantly worse.
That said, there are others that's actually doing fairly well (we're not entirely without urban areas).
In Norway it's not the government but individual parliamentarians that propose laws, the ministers in the government just being some of them, but laws are proposed and enforced by the opposition as often as by the government as there's different majorities on a case by case basis.
There's even been cases of the far right and far left proposing and voting on laws together that they've managed to get passed.
If a party supported the governing coalition without being members of said coalition they're free to vote however they like on all the proposals (usually the agreement includes a promise to support the first budget after the election though).
If a party is a member of a coalition themselves they'll negotiate a platform with their partners making deals about supporting each other in certain legeslations etc, however anything not included in those coalition negotiations they're free to vote however they like, although the prime minister may talk to the leaders in the member parties on a case by case basis and they in turn may enforce certain voting or behavior in public in order to make life easier for the coalition, the cost of not following such rules is potentially losing your membership in a party, but you'll still be a representative in parliament till the end of the term even if you leave or change party, as long as you don't break the law.
And that's another objection, no one party should have enough power to dominate any region.
Our biggest political party had 26,3% of the national votes, and 48 out of 169 seats for instance in our last national election.
CDU being biggest in 50% of the regions shouldn't mean that they automatically get 50% of the votes there.
Nor should 50% of the regions consenting be enough, as 50% still means that you may ignore huge differences and such a majority may be able to enforce laws that's seriously harmful.
Norway is unitary, with our parliament having the last say rather than local governments.
But our system means that it's relatively easy for rural communities to change the makeup of said parliament.
You don't need to get a majority in any of those locations, even being top 5 political parties there will often get you a seat.
I agree that it's a bad decision on Germanys part, especially because Germany is more then capable of competing when it comes to EVs
Tesla is making a profit with their EV sales, non of the big traditional car companies are doing so yet, but all the ones that's close to do so are German.
If this had passed Germany would have a huge advantage, especially on the European market.
And I think that in the long run you'd probably our scale even the Chinese and Tesla.
But even so, in this case, we're still able to enforce these laws on a country by country basis.
Here in Norway we're already in the high 80s when it comes to EVs market share in percentage...
And that's excluding plug in hybrids and hybrids, just pure EVs.
I'm glad that it's just a hypothetical.
Honestly in a ideal world I'd prefer every country in the world being small countries with a population of roughly Iceland but cooperating in supernatural confederations.
Yes, it would probably cause all sort of headaches, but it would be worth it I feel.
Yes, that would involve Norway being split up too.
Definitely not going to happen, but yeah...
As for the weather.
Nah, it's nice right now.
But my gosh didn't snow a lot the last two days.
My region received the most snow in a night that we've had in 60 years. (We've had more snow accumulate before over longer time, and we have had more snow in a night over 60 years ago, so it's not a record.
But I definitely haven't seen this much falling this fast... Barely managed to get out due to the snow blocking the door, and broke my shovel trying to get rid of the damned snow, thankfully my neighbor helped me out, so we managed to get to the store before running out of food...)
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@derdude6214 Alright, sorry about writing his name wrong. -_-
There's some differences between the various Nordic countries.
But the basic idea is that there's electoral circles with a single seat.
Like Germany we have electoral circles overlapping other ones.
The two option thing you mentioned.
You have the country divided up into single seat constituencies with basically the same first past the post system as in the UK applying there.
So if you have 10 political parties each getting 10% of the votes but one party has a single more vote then the others that one seat goes ro that party (100% of that single seat constituency) even if 8 of the 10 political parties are fundamentally against the values of that one party.
So for instance if AfD gets 10% of the votes + 1 they'll get that seat even if all the other parties with 10% where to be left leaning.
The difference between the German system and the British system is that those single seat constituencies also overlap multi member constituencies.
So if you have 10 single seat constituencies and 10 seats shared in the multi member constituency overlapping them then the parties will get those 10 multi-member seats proportionally based on the percentage of votes they got but taking into account the number of seats they already got in the single seat constituencies.
That means that in the above example of AfD getting 10% of the votes they'd get 10 seats because they had 10% + 1 vote while the other parties would get 1 seat each.
Despite AfD literally only having 10 more votes in total they get half the seats in this theoretical example.
The idea with the single seat constituencies is that with fewer seats you can allow smaller constituencies in theory giving people more local agency.
But in practice such single seat constituencies tends to favour larger parties as they're more likely to tip that threshold of getting that + 1 vote, potentially leading to some voter apathy, although it's not as extreme as in the anglophone world with their first past the post systems.
5% is also a really difficult threshold to pass making it harder for smaller parties to break though and get recognition, meaning that you're more likely to just get regional or ethnic parties.
I'm guessing that you have parties for Danes, Frisians and that Slavic minority you guys have that I don't remember the name of right now?
They have a chance of building up enough local support to break though and get a seat, but are unlikely to get wider support.
Discouraging smaller parties from forming is a way for the big two to hold onto power by making it difficult to really challenge them or the status quo.
The difference between the German system and the Nordic ones is that instead of single member constituencies being overlapped by a larger multi-member constituency we have multi-member constituencies at all levels.
So instead of a green party candidate in your example for that local level and a SPD candidate at a higher level we just use a party list and vote for one list.
That list then wins seats in the more local smaller constituencies and then you also win seats in the bigger constituency as well taking into account the seats won locally.
But since the local seats already ate more proportional we need fewer seats at a higher level to correct the difference in proportionality at a higher level from at the lower level.
That bigger electoral circle in our case is our countries, but it could be a state too.
In theory you could have multiple stacking electoral circles.
So a German state could have several constituencies with a few members each, then there might be those leveling seats, the higher level multi-member constituency for the German state then above that you could have leveling seats for all of Germany.
And since each level is proportional you'd need few leveling seats at each level to correct the proportionality, while still ensuring local representation.
To achieve this just merge a few of your single seat constituencies.
Now the part about not having any lower limit for a seat is a Norwegian unique feature.
Having a limit of some kind is useful to avoid the fracturing of politics that Germany experienced between the world wars where you essentially ended up with many votes being wasted by going to parties so small that they had no real influence and no way of countering bigger parties like the fascists who where less fractured.
Having some incentive towards working together instead of endlessly splitting over minor Issues is a advantage over the system in the Weimar republic.
While we still allow parties that split or new parties that start from scratch to have a real chance of getting representation by not having a formal limit, meaning that real issues can be dealt with.
The number of seats that a electoral circle/constituency have of course matters in this regard as you'll need enough votes to beat a party for one of those seats.
So in my earlier example where one party got a seat with about 5 k voters they represented Finnmark.
Finnmark had 5 seats in that election and 39 299 people voted there that year (as you can probably tell they have a low population, part of why they have so many seats is that they have a lot of land and that also gives seats in our system)
4 of those 5 seats where given based on how people in Finnmark voted.
We use a modified Sainte-Laguë method for distributing seats.
So with the biggest party in Finnmark being labour with 31,4% of the votes in Finnmark (26,1% nationally).
And given that 39 299 voters voted they presumably got about 12 000 votes, give or take.
The regular Sainte-Laguë method would be to take those votes and divide it by 2x the number of seats they already have in that electoral circle + 1
(The+1 thing is to avoid ending up in a situation where you're dividing with zero if no seats have been distributed yet, so about 12 000 votes dividend on two times zero seats + 1 is 12 000 / 1 = 12 000 = bigger then any other party, so they get the first seat.
Next time this is calculated they'd have 12 000 divided by two times 1 is 2 plus 1 is 3, while another party would have a bigger number after that calculation..
The Sainte-Laguë method tends to favour smaller parties rather than larger ones giving smaller parties slightly more representation then exact proportionality.)
Because we use a modified version instead of dividing on 1 -> 3 -> 5 -> 7 -> 9 etc we use 1,4 as the first number instead of 1, so 12 000 / 1,4
Using 1,4 instead of 1 makes it slightly harder to get that first seat for smaller parties once the bigger parties get their seats, since the difference between 1,4 and 3 is smaller, so it's easier to get a second seat vs another party on the verge of getting their first then if we used just 1.
As a result we actually have pretty good proportionality in our system as our modification kind of removes some the bias towards smaller parties in the Sainte-Laguë method (voters divided on two x number of seats + 1) without giving the bias towards bigger parties in the d'Hondt method (voters divided on number of seats + 1)
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@Zdamaneta We have our own travelers, two groups of them with two different languages (they arrived at different times).
And it's not a matter of culture.
The travelers have been discriminated in Romania for a long time.
Indeed they used to be slaves there.
This isn't about ethnic groups, it's about citizens of Romania functioning worse here then other ethnic groups because of structural issues within Romania.
Don't get me wrong, I totally get that overcoming such issues isn't easy.
Minorities who have faced discrimination are less likely to trust a government that has been used by the majority population for said discrimination then the majority population is.
You see that all over the world.
My black american ex girlfriend didn't exactly have much faith in the US government, education system or health care system, all of them historically used to discriminate minorities.
Here in Norway the Sami people still distrust the government and the majority population despite our attempts to make amends, rectify previous harm etc.
It's just going to take generations.
For Romania that discriminated minority is the travelers.
But travelers wish to see their children having a future just as much as the majority population does.
Not at the cost of their values and cultural distinctiveness, but never the less.
I've had travelers as neighbours before.
And they're overrepresented in our music industry, just like the black population in America is.
There's two traveler populations native to Norway, one that arrived much earlier and that's more integrated into Norwegian society, and one that arrived centuries later.
They have different languages, both recognized by the Norwegian government.
Romani and Romanes.(Yes, those two words are used interchangeably for the language of the travelers in some countries, but since we have two populations and one uses one name and the others the other name for the language that just works best for us, names for the ethnic groups themselves us a bit more complicated as there's no consensus about what's the best name, although most of the older group seems to prefer travelers, and most of the later group "Sigøyner".
There's also a third traveling people here not considered a part of either ethnic group.
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@ComradeAart I'm a soft EU sceptic in the sense that I believe that the final decisions should always be at as local a level as possible.
That's said the EU is not going anywhere and we need the EU in the future too.
Most of our problems in the world are supernational in nature and we need more international cooperation to solve them.
The EU and UN need reform, not disbanding.
They need support and activism to change them towards a more confederal model where local communities are more empowered and where large population centers and more powerful nations can't run the show solo anymore.
The EU has played a major role in preventing major wars on the European continent for many many years, and have improved peoples economic prospects, personal freedom, legal rights etc.
The issue is that it's failing to adapt to differences in local needs and is too focused on unifying laws across the continent.
Edit:
Remember that pollution and many other issues in Europe crosses country borders.
Closing a border does not stop pollution from another country from reaching you, it doesn't stop acid rain, it doesn't stop climate changes and all the damages that causes us with more severe storms etc, it doesn't solve climate refugees within our own borders when insurance premiums goes up due to increased damages, or rising costs due to supply chain issues.
It doesn't stop diseases from crossing borders through the animals that does, like birds etc.
It doesn't stop military threats from increasing.
It doesn't stop shortages of resources and innovation within individual countries.
No country in Europe can manage on its own without cooperation with other European countries.
We're the old world, we've already used up most of our resources, many of them found outside the continent.
Our demographics means that we can't possibly keep up with other continents with a larger and younger population in innovation, and we're facing democratic backsliding in many nations.
No, the EU is needed.
But it's in dire need of reform.
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@DemiLad
India is a extremely poor democracy.
Same with the US.
The EU and Germany are bad, but they're at least better then those two...
No country with first past the post have a well functioning democracy.
MMP like in Germany, New Zealand, Scotland and Wales is a touch better, but still flawed.
These systems all end up way too focused on individuals with less focus on actual policies.
And too many seats are awarded to the major parties as it inherently disfavour smaller ones making the balance of power a lot less nuanced leaving many aspects of the country, many voters essentially unrepresented.
The EU got party list proportional right at least.
And having multiple multi-member constituencies is also good.
But although there's more seats pr voter in some countries with a low population then in others with a high one it's still a far cry from being even close to capable of representing all the people and all the issues that a smaller national government is capable off.
That's called degressive proportionality by the way...
The issue is that you have whole languages and whole people who are too small to be represented in the EU at all.
Whole segments of society with issues that a EU parliament will never hear about.
There's a upper limit to how many representatives you can have in a parliament before it stops functioning due to there simply being too many people...
The EU with between seven and eight hundred seats is pretty close to that limit, and already far past the efficient levels that national governments operate under.
Degressive proportionality helps reduce the risk of such groups being totally ignored, but the reality is that they *are*.
Laws are being made by lawmakers completely oblivious to the harm said laws is doing.
While in a national parliament since you don't need seats for people in other nations it's possible to cover more of your own population.
Although when you get populations of more then a million people you're still running into issues...
I live in Norway.
We have 10 political parties currently represented in our parliament.
Our smallest party had 4 908 total votes and got one seat in our parliament.
Because we also have a form of degressive proportionality.
That was enough to make said party the third biggest in the constituency they where elected in, a constituency with 5 seats.
And one with several ethnic groups, including one of our ethnic minorities the Sami people.
The constituency is also divided up by mountains.
So there's a hospital essentially on either end of it, but the middle, including the biggest settlement doesn't have access to a hospital when the weather is too bad to cross the mountains as that's also too bad weather for air ambulances...
Meaning that people with heart attack or giving birth or stroke have to stay stuck in a area with no hospital and just hope for the best till the weather clears.
As you can imagine that caused frustration.
And the creation of a new political party.
We could represent less then 5 k people in our parliament, because it's small.
By comparison my own political party had 110 973 voters, and got 3 seats.
Why?
Because we're a more urban political party with mainly urban voters.
And because the proportionality of the Norwegian electoral system is somewhat low for parties with less then 4% of the total voters.
So dividing our voters by the number of seats we got we had
36 991 voters pr seat.
Most political parties in Norway has about half that number of voters pr seat they get.
About 16 000 to 17 000 voters usually being needed to get a seat.
Depending slightly on where in the country you are.
(Seats are distributed among the constituencies based on both population and land area).
By comparison, Germany with a population of 84 358 845 currently have 96 seats in the EU parliament, with 878 738 voters pr seat.
Finland has a population of 5 563 970, the closest to our own here in Norway, 14 seats and 397 426 voters pr seat.
The whole Sami population in Norway is estimated at about 40 000 people...
They can be represented in a parliament where their main constituency requires less then 5 000 votes to get a representative.
You can even ensure that different viewpoints among them is represented, with some proportionality.
With over ten times their total population needed for a single seat in the EU parliament they'll have no voice.
The EU is dominated by people living in the parts of the EU where it's easy to live, on the European plains.
Basically areas with fertile soil where you can feed a lot of people and keep them alive.
By contrast, only 3% of Norway is suitable for agriculture, less then 1% suitable to grow grain, and about 2% actually used at all.
And large parts of the year zero percent of the country is suitable for agriculture, simply because of the climate.
Iceland (technically 6% suitable, but less then 1% actually utilized, in part due to climate issues) face similar issues, so does Sweden and Finland.
And honestly, so do a number of EU members, either in parts or all of their territory.
Parts of Switzerland also has that issue, with only really one area with any significant amount of farming land, while the rest of the country is mountains.
About a third of Switzerland is technically suitable for agriculture, after all, livestock can make use of even mountainous areas, but only about a tenths is actually used for agriculture for various reasons, including climate...
Austria, Italy, Slovakia...
And while Hungary does have a lot of agricultural land in use they also have a lot of mountainous areas, and they're one of only a few people with a non-Indo-European national language, and therefore a very different culture.
Due to various former treaties their ethnic group is a minority in many neighbouring countries.
All countries where they're too small a ethnic group to really have the voice that their total European population perhaps should suggest.
And I doubt that there's many in the EU parliament that knows how it is to live as a Hungarian minority in Ukraine or Romania or any of the many other countries in the areas in question.
And what about travelers?
No, if you try to make decisions at a EU level without giving nations a chance to opt out when a law doesn't work, you end up with a lot of victims.
Most countries in Europe are already way too big at a national level, making it hard to represent everyone fairly there.
A continent wide parliament with federal or unitary powers is literally a nightmare for democracy...
Only a confederate EU would actually be democratic in my view.
That said, I absolutely agree that we need closer cooperation.
Supernational organizations like the UN and the EU and NATO can cover that need, but only as long as they remain supernational, and members remain sovereign.
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@PrexXyx If the majority of the population of those 2-3 countries genuinly is against something then that really does need to be changed, not passed.
If just the goverment in said countries is against something however and they where elected in a election system etc that favoured certain parties over others then that's of course a different matter.
As a example of why I think that's important I'd llike to showcase something in my own country from our last election.
In Norway the number of representatives to our parliament isn't distributed among the counties just based on population but also based on land area.
This is intended to ensure a increased representation for the low population areas of Norway, specifically in the north where several of our traditional minority populations live, like the Sami people and the Kven people as well as native Norwegians that just have a harder life in general with less infrastructure and services then in the south.
Anyway, in our last election the two largest parties both planned to shut down a hospital in the eastern part of our northernmost county of Finnmark.
The typical arguments, saving money, more efficent running, bigger professional teams able to handle more complicated cases etc.
You get the idea.
The counter argument is that this part of eastern Finnmark is east of some mountains from where the closest hospital would be if this one is closed down, meaning that it's literally impossible to get there if the road over the mountain is closed down in case of bad weather, and even in good weather the time to get there might be long, potentially hours.
So as you might imagine the locals where not amused.
So some local labour party representatives (and perhaps some other people in other parties?) split off and made a new list (we have a party list proportional electoral system, so you don't necessarily need a party to get voted in, just to be on a list getting enough votes, and a representative can potentially be on multiple lists in a election).
Anyway, they managed to get into our parliament with one representative with just 4 908 votes as a result, meaning that they'll have a vote in our parliament when this kind of decisions is going to be made, not enough to outright veto the closing down of that hospital, but enough that they could potentially trade their vote for support in something else to perhaps change that decision.
We have 169 seats, 150 of those are elected proportionally within those 19 counties that we used to have (some has been merged, but we're still using the legacy counties for national election purposes as it takes time to change those election laws)
The remaining 19 seats are correcting the difference between the national votes and the local ones, so the power between political parties isn't too skewed by the local elections (and those 19 seats also represents each county with one person each although the actual choice of who that person in those counties is is based on the national vote).
We have no lower limit for the number of votes needed to get a seat in our parliament for the 150 normal seats, just for those 19 leveling seats, so there's a incentive to get above that threshold of 4% for those leveling seats, but you can be represented just fine with fewer seats.
Anyway, as a result that new party opposing the closing of that hospital got into our parliament with 4 908 votes like I mentioned.
My own preferred party is on the opposite end of the scale, we had 110 973 votes, but being below that 4% limit means that we only got the seats elected directly within each of those 19 electoral circle, those counties.
That means that we had 36 991 seats pr representative we had vs the 4 908 of that party opposing the closing of that hospital.
Most of our parties have between 15 and 16 k voters behind each of their seats.
After all, we have a population of 5 million.
Anyway, our system allowed people in that area agency to ensure that it's livable up there.
That kind of agency is important everywhere in Europe.
Still, our system also ensures that larger parties does have more power, and that there's incentives to find compromises and shared solutions.
Merging two smaller parties below the 4% limit to get above 4% can significantly increase their representation and power and may be well worth doing, and splitting off from the larger parties over minor dissagreements isn't really worth the gamble as it's hard to get enough support in key areas to get representation like that particular party got.
Still, if you have a important enough issue you can get direct local representation to deal with local issues in our system.
And parties with a broader base that doesn't necessarily have enough concentration of our electorate in any one given area like mine can compensate for that through our leveling seats.
And while yes, the threashold for our leveling seats means that we got less representation then we'd have without such a limit it also motivates people to vote as even a few votes can make up the difference between getting over that limit or not giving a bit of that "swing state" effect in the US.
Both in that more people want to vote if their vote matters, but also in that rural areas actually have a say so all parties want some rural voters while we're still proportional so nowhere near as unfair as the US elections.
On the whole I like our system even if it's a bit painful to be as dissadvantaged as we where in this election, hopefully we'll make it over 4% next election. ;-)
(The divide between parties under 4% and over 4% also means that those of us over 4% get more representation pr voters then those under 4% since those seats are freed up to be fought over by us, so small parties over 4% gets some real power, yet you don't get politically irrelevant under 4% as you can see above)
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@alexshevchenko2494 India, the US and Russia are all cases of poorly run countries that absolutely should be reduced in size to function better as democracies.
And the federal model is exactly why those countries works poorly and their citizens are suffering.
If you think that a confederation can't hold together, just look at Switzerland from 1291 till 1848.
The country was a confederation for all of that time.
So a confederation can absolutely last a long time.
Likewise the UN has had most of the worlds countries as members practically since the war, and that has worked just fine.
I don't mind countries sharing laws, I'd like tighter integration in the form of a UN army, shared taxes etc.
But the fundamental principle of power going from the bottom up and not the other way is essential to a majority of Europeans.
Yes, a majority of people support the UN but most people want it as a supernational entity, like the UN, not as a new "United States of Europe"
When we're talking about multi-tier Europe it's not because anyone wants more integration into such a USEU but because the EU even in its current form doesn't fit for many nations, both inside and outside the union, and said nations would like something with another form then the current EU that gives us more national sovereignty without being entirely excluded.
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