The quiet days of August are a good time to contemplate the year ahead. Peering at my 2024 calendar, the European Parliament elections loom largest. Sadly, they fail to inspire me the way they did five years ago.
In 2019, I stood for the European Parliament in Germany while a German colleague stood in Greece. DiEM25, our pan-European movement, wanted to make the point that European democracy will remain a sham unless it becomes fully transnational. In 2024, such gestures are not even symbolically meaningful.
My weariness, as I face next June’s European elections, is not due to any loss of interest in European politics or to recent political defeats, of which I have had my fair share. What wearies me is the difficulty of even imagining democracy’s seeds taking root in the European Union in my lifetime.
European loyalists will lambast me for saying this. How dare I describe the EU as a democracy-free zone, when it is run by a Council comprising elected prime ministers and presidents, a Commission appointed by elected national governments, and a Parliament elected directly by Europe’s peoples and vested with the power to dismiss the appointed Commission?
The hallmark of any democracy in deeply unequal societies is institutions designed to prevent the reduction of all human interaction to power relations. To keep despotism at bay, the executive’s discretionary power must be minimized by a sovereign polity with the means to minimize it.
— source yanisvaroufakis.eu | Yanis Varoufakis | 01/09/2023