Verbatim report of proceedings

Thursday, 14 September 2023 - Strasbourg

Parliamentarism, European citizenship and democracy (A9-0249/2023 - Alin Mituța, Niklas Nienass)

  Mick Wallace (The Left). – Madam President, I too voted against it as giving the big boys more power than they have already is a disaster. The reforms proposed in this report are only scratching at the surface of the problem.

Is the EU a democracy? What started as an ideal has, through the decades, been muddied and garbled by right-wing neoliberal reforms and undemocratic Treaty change. We have deeply flawed institutions that are unanswerable, opaque and endlessly bureaucratic.

The place is run by lobbyists. We have 705 MEPs with 60 000 lobbyists in Brussels. My God! Most of them are hired by big industry trying to influence the decision making.

But what is democracy anyway? Do we ever ask ourselves that? Is it having a vote every five years? I don’t think so. Democracy is where the ordinary citizen would have a say in how his country, how his community is run. They don’t have it. We don’t even have local government. You couldn’t have it without local government.

Democracy is overrated as we know it, and we pretend we have it, but a really good example of that is that today 80% of the people have made clear in Europe that they want the war in Ukraine to end and they want peace rather than continuing to punish Russia, but 80% of the politicians across Europe want the war to continue and they want to continue to fuel it.

So who represents who? The politicians do not represent the citizens of Europe!