There is an issue that has been floating around the EU Referendum debate for some time now: the claim that the EU is run by unelected officials. Let’s look at this in detail.

The UK Government

First let’s look at how the UK government works, to use as a comparison. The UK government is run by the Prime Minister, who both wields executive power and writes the vast majority of the legislation that passes through Parliament.

The Prime Minister is appointed by the Queen, but political reality constrains the Queen’s choice. If she appointed anyone other than the candidate with the support of a majority in the elected House of Commons, the Commons would use their power to pass a vote of no confidence to remove her appointment, and would keep removing them until she appointed their favoured candidate. Thus, though the Prime Minister is not directly elected by the British electorate, we can say he is indeed elected, albeit indirectly.

How the EU works

For all the claims that the EU is a complicated, it’s actually very simple. When it comes to legislation, you have three relevant bodies:

– The EU Commission (the executive).

– The EU Parliament (composed of elected MEPs).

– The Council of Ministers (composed of cabinet ministers from the Member States).

The EU Commission writes a piece of legislation, and to pass it needs the approval of both Parliament and the Council of Ministers. See? Simple. The idea behind it all is to balance pan-European democracy (the EU Parliament) with national democracy (the Council of Ministers).

Don’t forget that the Council of Ministers is not the same thing as the European Council, which is composed of the EU member states’ heads of government, and determines the general direction of the EU via the treaties.

(The European Council is in turn not to be confused with the Council of Europe, which isn’t part of the EU at all.)

EU elections

The EU equivalent of the UK Prime Minister is the President of the EU Commission. They wield executive power and write all the legislation that passes the EU Parliament (the EU Parliament does not have Private Members Bills).

The Commission President is appointed by the European Council, but political reality constrains the Council’s choice. If they appointed anyone other than the candidate with the support of a majority in the elected EU Parliament, Parliament would use their power to veto the appointment until the Council appointed their preferred candidate. Thus, though the Commission President is not directly elected by the European electorate, we can say he is indeed elected, albeit indirectly.

As you will have noticed, I copy-pasted that from the British mechanism above and just replaced the nouns. There’s a one to one equivalence between the process of electing the UK Prime Minister and the Commission President.

The one disanalogy is that the Commission President, while having the support of the majority of the legislature, is not himself a member of the legislature. But this is hardly a requirement for democracy. In many countries the head of the executive is not a member of the legislature. In fact it’s often considered more democratic for the executive and the legislature to not overlap, under the principle of separation of powers.

So who voted for Juncker?

Jean-Claude Juncker, the current President of the EU Commission, received 422 votes in favour and 250 votes against his appointment in the EU Parliament. Juncker is a member of the European People’s Party (EPP), but also received support from the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats (S&D).

In terms of UK votes, Labour MEPs are a part of S&D so voted for Juncker, representing 4,020,646 British votes, or 27.4% of the British vote. (Link)

So a majority of Brits didn’t vote for Juncker?

No indeed.

It should be remembered that a majority of Brits did not vote the Tories in, who had a vote share of 36.8% in the 2015 elections (link). Does that make Britain undemocratic? Many would argue that Britain would be more democratic under a proportional representation system, but I think few would go so far as to say that Britain is not a democracy.

We need to avoid the idea that a system is only democratic if your preferred candidate wins. Such an attitude is actually profoundly opposed to democracy, which requires that the losers respect the will of the people. The fact that a majority of Brits did not vote for the winner does not make European elections undemocratic, it merely means that a majority of Brits lost the election. Just as they did in the 2015 UK General Election.

But this is also where the sovereignty point comes in. Remember sovereignty is not the same thing as democracy. The two can be separated (in very simple terms) with the following questions:

Democracy: is the government elected?

Sovereignty: are the borders of the government’s control the same as the borders of the nation?

From the above we can see that Juncker is indeed elected. However, he is elected not by the British electorate, but by the European electorate. That is to say, Britain does not have sovereignty on EU affairs. This essentially boils down the the recognition that the EU is not the same thing as Britain.

The EU Commission is democratic, then?

Hold your horses! I have so far equated democracy with being elected for convenience, but a true democracy involves more than just elections. When academics talk about the EU’s democratic deficit they generally are not referring to the EU’s election process or constitution.

Rather, the democratic deficit comes from the absence of a strong European political culture. The EU admits this themselves in their glossary entry for “democratic deficit”:

The real EU democratic deficit seems to be the absence of European politics.

(Source)

In a strong democracy you have an electorate who are aware of the main political parties, their leaders, and what ideology and policies they stand for. The people have opinions on which one is right and which is wrong.

By necessity therefore you need to have strong political parties that back a single policy agenda and will vote as a block, which allows the electorate to vote for and identify with a clearly identifiable direction.

You have rigorous debate between rival political parties, each with a clearly distinct vision of the government’s agenda.

You have the government being held to account by an opposition.

You have parties conducting high profile campaigning.

You have a media that is engaged with all this and keeps the people informed so that the people are invested in the process.

This is what the EU lacks, and what makes the EU’s democracy weak. Not the EU constitution or elections but the EU political culture.

It is not merely that the EU works by consensus rather than a more adversarial approach. German politics works by consensus too, with the government consisting of a grand coalition of the two biggest parties and other parties besides. Germany is of course still a democracy. But what Germany’s consensus politics has that the EU lacks is that party politics continue after the elections. The parties continue to push different agendas and oppose each other. It’s just that they oppose each other constructively, via reaching compromise on legislation. In the EU, once the Commission is elected they face no real political opposition, except from the Member States themselves and from eurosceptic MEPs who oppose everything on principle.

But there are two bits of good news with regards to the EU’s lack of a strong political culture.

The first is that no treaty change or constitutional reform is needed to make the EU a stronger democracy. The EU already has all the legal and constitutional mechanisms in place. It just has to use them.

The second is that the EU’s political culture is slowly forming. There is now a pan-European news company, politico.eu (a private company, not a state media outlet). More may follow. Further, the crises of recent years are beginning to polarise EU politics, meaning there’s more debate, opposition, and politicians being held to account. Remember that EU democracy is young. Juncker is the first Commission President elected under the new rules (from the Lisbon Treaty) that gives EU Parliament a veto and thus the power to choose the Commission President. It’s going to take time for strong parties and distinct platforms to develop.

The Remain campaign has often been admonished for lacking positive messages. So here’s a positive message: EU democracy is getting stronger and no significant reform or treaty change is needed to make it a true democracy. All that is needed is for the people to pay more attention.