European union: Why do we bother to vote?

Romaric Godin
La Tribune (France)

European Union leaders don’t even bother to hide their contempt for the people, said Romaric Godin. On the sidelines of another failed budget summit last week, euro zone leaders appointed Yves Mersch, a central banker from Luxembourg, to the board of the European Central Bank. Apparently it didn’t bother them in the slightest that the European Parliament had voted overwhelmingly to recommend that a woman be considered instead of Mersch so that the board wouldn’t be all male. You can argue that the parliament’s reason was stupid, but “that hardly matters.” In a democracy, you’re not supposed to just “ignore a parliamentary vote.” The EU, though, isn’t run democratically, but rather by “heads of state and government who are determined that only their voices should be heard.” While the ECB has failed to contain the euro crisis for the past two years, the EU still stubbornly insists on appointing yet another banking insider. Of course, the same heads of state who just “wiped their feet all over” the will of the parliament shall “tearily deplore the mass abstention that will inevitably mark the next European election.” What, they will moan, is causing this “illness eating away at our democracy”? The answer is clear: their own elitism.