EUROSCEPTIC politicians and newspapers, especially British ones, are fond of referring to the officials of the European Union as “unelected bureaucrats”. In March Nigel Farage, the former UK Independence Party leader, dismissed “Jean-Claude Juncker and the unelected gang in Brussels”. In April the Daily Telegraph, a broadsheet, castigated “unelected bureaucrats in Brussels” for backing Emmanuel Macron in the French presidential election. In June the Express, a tabloid, ran a feature on the salaries of “unelected EU bosses”, whom it had introduced the previous September in a story with the headline “Meet the unelected bureaucrats making YOUR laws”. Curiously, one of the “unelected bureaucrats” in that article was Martin Schulz, then the president of the European Parliament, who was in fact an elected German MEP. Another was Mr Juncker, president of the European Commission; as the very same story reported, he was “elected by the European Parliament—taking into account the results of the European elections.” What do people mean when they denounce the EU’s “unelected bureaucrats”, and are they making any sense?

Every government has bureaucrats, who are by nature unelected. The EU, with about 33,000 civil servants, is dwarfed by the British government, which employs over 400,000. The complaint might be that not only junior EU officials, but many senior ones are appointed rather than elected; yet this, too, is true of all governments. British papers that disparage the “unelected” Michel Barnier, the EU’s lead Brexit negotiator, would struggle to find a country that has an elected trade representative. As for the 28 commissioners who make up the European Commission, the EU’s cabinet, they are nominated by member countries (each gets one) and approved by the European Parliament, which is directly elected by voters. This is similar to the United States, where cabinet members are nominated by the president and approved by the Senate. The European Council, which is essentially the EU’s chief executive body, comprises the 28 member countries’ leaders, all democratically elected. Its president, Donald Tusk, is elected by those leaders rather than directly by voters, but his role is more that of a mediator than a leader in his own right.

Eurosceptics retort that no voter ever cast a ballot for Mr Juncker. This is not quite true. In the European Parliament election of 2014, each of the parliamentary “groupings” (made up of like-minded parties from different countries) ran under a Spitzenkandidat, or lead candidate. Mr Juncker was Spitzenkandidat of the centre-right European People’s Party (EPP), which got the most votes. He was approved in an up-down vote in the European Parliament. European voters chose MEPs who then picked the commission’s president, much as British voters choose MPs who then pick the prime minister. It is true that Mr Juncker’s name did not appear on ballots, nor, in most countries, did the parliamentary groupings to which national parties belong. That is because every country can set the rules for its European Parliament elections, and most do not want pan-European parties or commission presidents to have the power of a direct popular mandate.

This brings us to the legitimate part of the eurosceptics’ critique. No one disputes that the European Union has a “democratic deficit”: a lack of direct accountability to voters. Citizens are often unaware of how the commission and the European Parliament function, or of which groupings their parties belong to. But that is largely because making things simpler would require pooling politics in one European arena, and the politicians and citizens of different European countries do not want to do that. As Anand Menon, an EU expert at King’s College in London, puts it, the system relies on “indirect elections via a demos that doesn’t exist”. There is no common European people to act as the subject of democratic politics, and different nations do not trust each other enough to create one. If anyone proposed a direct EU-wide election for the commission president, the eurosceptics who denounce the “unelected” Mr Juncker would surely reject it. Eurosceptics have a valid case against the EU, but not because its leaders are “unelected bureaucrats”. Rather, its bureaucrats are too insulated from democracy, and its democracy is not functioning well enough without a common demos to make it work.