You could argue that the US Senate is the more powerful chamber. But I don’t care about democracy here. You could hardly make the selection of the commission any less democratic, so anything is an improvement.

But you cannot simply alter the balance of power that much. Maybe it would be enough to simply remove the commission from the process of legislation.
My point is that you cannot import only a part of Westminster to Brussels. We can live with the parliament as it is now, one part of many in legislation. Give all power to it, and it cannot stay as it is.

BTW, do you have an encyclopedic knowledge of political systems accross the world or do you have a super secret web site source? (wikipedia is not very precise in describing political systems most of the time).

As for balance lots of political system have a chamber that do not represent population fairly (senate in France) but it usually has less power than the other more “representative” chamber. In lots of system the executive is an emanation of the parliament, so more or less “slave”. Changing the balance of European institutions will obviously require matched changes to keep the system reasonably democratic (as you point out).

Is San Marino EU to you?

As for balance between the three powers, this is the essence of democracy

But you are not asking for balance. You are asking for the commission to be a slave of the parliament. If you do that for the sake of democracy, you will have to explain why a Maltese voter is worth 10.3 German voters.

As for balance between the three powers, this is the essence of democracy (for me at least) so “shifting” is needed (mat be I don’t understand your remark though).

snowflake5, I describe only two commission powers: monopoly over law origination and veto over legislative outcome. I don’t know how you cut that in half or transform these powers to just “suggestions”.

Except for the president of France, no one of them is elected by the voters.

You write: “As for power of origination, if example if a voted directive turns out to favour big multinational in practice and destroys competition, innovation, SME, … Who has the political power to fix it or … not to fix it? (see the intellectual property mess).”

The Council has the political power to “fix it” as you put it. The commission can only make suggestions - it’s the Council that DECIDES. And both the Council and Parliament can amend the proposals. All the members of the council are ELECTED by the voters in their countries. If the commission proposes something that the Council doesn’t like, it simply gets vetoed. Note that most directives need a unanimous decision in the council.

So in order for the EU to be “anti-democratic” as you put it, ALL 25 elected governments who sit on the Council must be anti-democratic! Which is absurd by definition, because they are all elected.

If you don’t want the EU to do something, make it an issue in your National elections - that way, the government you elect is bound by electoral mandate to behave in a certain way in the Council. The trouble is that EU issues don’t get discussed in national elections at all, even though you are not only electing a government to deal with domestic issues, but a key player in the Council. It’s not the EU’s fault that voters in national elections don’t understand their responsibility. It’s the fault of politicians, and to a certain extent of us the voters, for not understanding properly how the EU works.

That is news to the citizens of Switzerland, the USA, Brazil and Mexico.

the mere existance of the possibility changes A LOT the balance of powers between government and parliament

Exactly. And therefore it is not the problem. When we complain about lacking democracy, we should introduce democracy, not shift power.

As for power of origination, if example if a voted directive turns out to favour big multinational in practice and destroys competition, innovation, SME, … Who has the political power to fix it or … not to fix it? (see the intellectual property mess).

Oliver, I don’t think snowflake5 is able to make a difference between a dictatorship and a democracy :).

The “yes” men answer to your remark is just that in practice the parliament with a simple majority can overthrow the government (in every democracy, excluding Europe of course) but that it very rarely happens in practice so it’s useless.

I’ll answer it: of course it doesn’t happen often in practice, but the mere existance of the possibility changes A LOT the balance of powers between government and parliament.

This is a political truth at best. The UK parliament is perfectly able to legislate without input from any commission.

As for the Constitution - there was a constitution convention where governemnts in all the member states sent delegates (elected members of the governments) to thrash out an agreement. It’s completely unfair to blame the commission for it - for instance it wasn’t the commisison’s idea to make the constitutional treaty so huge and consolidate all the previous treaties into one. That idea came from the French delegation.

The problem is that it’s easy to blame the commission, it’s a dodge so that the elected people don’t have to take responsibility for their own decisions. And you are colluding by going along with that. Power in Europe lies with the Member States in the Council - it always has. It’s a nonsense to pretend otherwise.