There's a belief that legislators elected as MEPs are not particularly high quality, so it's not a good idea to give them too much power. OTOH it's hard to conv

There's a belief that legislators elected as MEPs are not particularly high quality, so it's not a good idea to give them too much power. OTOH it's hard to convince ambitious talented people to run for a job with little power, so there's a catch-22. It's also a way around the democratic deficit, though in reality the deficit is in government to government horse trading with plausible deniability ("the EU made us do it!"), not anonymous bureaucracy.