> The EU commissioners are the biggest fault with the EU and it's disheartening how no one addresses that > but a reform that makes it more democratic was out

> The EU commissioners are the biggest fault with the EU and it's disheartening how no one addresses that > but a reform that makes it more democratic was out of question. Because the existence of commissioners, and their strange position in the EU is both very deliberate, and incredibly important to the continued existence of the EU. The EU isn’t a federal government, it’s a super state entity that exists in an uneasy balance with governments of each member state. The consequence is that “more democracy” doesn’t help the EU, or make it more attractive (at least not to national governments, and they’re the ones that sign treaties). Balancing the powers of the individual EU states, with their elected governments and different democratic processes, with the powers of the EU as a super state entity is hard. No national government wants to hand off their own sovereign power to an external entity they have little direct influence over, so the EU commissioners exist. Their explicit purpose is to allow national governments to place a heavy thumb on the democratic scales in Brussels, to provide assurances to those national governments that their own state can’t be dictated to by other states within the EU who may hold different cultural values. The result of all this mess isn’t perfect, and is hard to understand as a random citizen. But simply getting rid of commissioners, and introducing “more democracy” which implicitly reduces the power of national governments, doesn’t provide a practical solution for the EU. The real solutions will be convoluted, nuanced, and slow to develop, that’s just the consequence of trying to get 27 very independent nation states to get along.