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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