Can Europe Become a True Democracy?

The European Union has been designed for the few, not for the many, yet today it affects everyone. So how can we change that? If you think about the European elections, they take place on very different dates, depending on where you're based. You vote for national parties, running national candidates, presenting national agendas. There's nothing European. The European elections are 27 national elections that then we really have to make sense of, after we actually cast the ballot. 

This creates, not only necessarily a democratic deficit, but an intelligence deficit. It means we don't really understand what is the link between our choice, our ballot box, and the political core of the European Commission. 

This explains why over the years, we have tried to europeanize the vote by basically asking our European political parties to tell us who are your candidates, running from all across the European vote. So you know that if you vote for the right, you're gonna get the right candidate for the Commission. 

If you vote for the left, you're gonna be heavy a left candidate for the European Commission. And this is the attempt, that has been going on for a su time. There's so much uncertainty, around the rules of the democratic game, and that's why we are trying, academics, researchers, but also think tanks and citizens who believe that Europe has to be democratized, to come up with ideas, that try to make the European Union work a little bit like a nation state, something we're more familiar with. 

And I think this Euro, Europeanization is key to allow, the, our governments, our policymakers to take better decisions that are able to tackle problems that have a transnational dimension. In other words, none of our democratic countries alone will be able to tackle those issues, and that's why European political conversation will be key and a requisite for any form of attempt of having the European Union thriving in a geopolitically shattered world. 

One of the most important practical, implications of this research is to ensure that the European Union decision-making, how decisions are taken by 27 different governments, might actually occur through a parliamentary mechanism. That basically means that there is a majority of Europeans that have certain preferences. They like the environment, they might dislike the war, and therefore these would be the direction, that the European Union takes. 

If instead there will be a sum of political priorities, preferences of our citizens that go towards degrading the economy, or let's say opposing the Green New Deal and going towards different objectives like industrial policy or creating European champions in order to compete with China or with the United States, well, this will be the direction of the European Union. For the time being, this is not happening, but this is, I think, the ideal scenario, to make sure that we're gonna move together in this European project that remains unique in the world and which continues to be challenged more and more by many other regions across the globe. 

So, to make you think harder about those questions, let me ask you something: what is the only activity that Europeans never do together? They do a lot of things together. They travel, they do business, they get married, they sell businesses, but there's one thing they never do together.