Europe's problem and the West's problem: a Sunday reflection

The European Union operates on an institutional design in which the Commission, whose 27 commissioners are not elected by voters, monopolises the power to initiate legislation, and where nearly 18,000 lobbying organisations operate registered in Brussels. That web produces decisions citizens would never vote for, without any need for corruption: the incentives alone are enough.

There is a way of looking at the European Union that does not go through the debate about whether it does too much or too little, but through something more uncomfortable: how it is built. Once every five years, citizens vote for a European Parliament that cannot initiate legislation. The body that proposes laws is the Commission, with 27 commissioners nobody elected, who emerge from closed-door negotiations between heads of state. Bills are then negotiated between the Commission, Parliament and the Council in the so-called trilogues, closed meetings where the real decisions are made. A rule that will apply to 450 million people goes through corridors that 99.9% of them will never see.

## Brussels, the lobbying capital

The distance is not just geographical. Brussels has become the world capital of lobbying: nearly 18,000 organisations are listed in the transparency register, tens of thousands of lobbyists, more than 50 per MEP. And that is only the declared part. Add the revolving door: a former MEP only has to wait six months before becoming a lobbyist to the EU himself.

The underlying problem is one of incentives, not sarracena. A national MP who votes for a law that ruins the farmers in his district runs into them at the market on Saturday. In Brussels, whoever decides never crosses paths with the people who live with their decisions, but dines with lobbyists every day. The system does not optimise for the population's welfare: it optimises for the interests of whoever is in the room. Corruption is not needed for that. Though sometimes, as Qatargate showed, there is some anyway.

## Mercosur and the referendum that was never repeated

The result is a structural incentive to accept things people would never vote for. The Mercosur agreement has been under negotiation for 25 years. France votes against it in the Council in January 2026 and is outvoted. To prevent national parliaments from blocking it, the Commission splits the agreement into two texts, including a trade agreement that only needs one vote in Brussels. The European Parliament itself writes, in black and white, that this split circumvents the rights of national parliaments, and refers the matter to the Court of Justice of the EU. The Commission's response: it applies the agreement provisionally from 1 May 2026, without waiting for the Court's opinion. Farmers were protesting outside Parliament. They lost anyway.

And it is worth remembering the only time people were asked directly about Europe: in 2005, France and the Netherlands rejected the European Constitution. The text returned two years later as the Treaty of Lisbon, ratified by parliaments. No more referendums.

## Migration quotas and mandatory solidarity

In immigration, the mechanism repeats itself. In 2015, relocation quotas were imposed by qualified majority on countries that had voted against them. From 12 June 2026, the Pact on Migration and Asylum applies across the whole Union with its mandatory solidarity mechanism: either you take people in, or you pay. No European people have been directly consulted about this, despite it being the issue that is transforming their societies most profoundly.

## Soros, the NGOs and the funded loop

The most sophisticated piece of the web has a name. **George Soros** understood before anyone else that you do not need to win elections if you shape the ecosystem around whoever decides. His network, the **Open Society Foundations**, is described as the world's largest private funder of advocacy groups. In Brussels it runs its own lobbying arm towards the European institutions, the Open Society European Policy Institute. Internal documents leaked in 2016 showed a paper titled "Reliable allies in the European Parliament" listing more than 200 MEPs, and strategies to build internal working groups that would gather allies capable of advancing its objectives in day-to-day work. Training sessions were organised for MEPs on how to counter the so-called populist parties.

The mechanism is elegant: think tanks produce the "expertise", NGOs produce the "demand from civil society", legal NGOs litigate, funded media produce the narrative. The decision-maker in Brussels, isolated from the population, hears the same message from every direction and ends up believing that this is what people want. And the loop funds itself: between 2021 and 2023, the EU paid around **7.4 billion euros** to NGOs, and the European Court of Auditors found that the use of that money was insufficiently transparent. It came to light that the Commission had funded NGOs to lobby MEPs in favour of its own Green Deal legislation. The institution pays "civil society" to ask it for what it already wanted to do.

All of this is legal. That is exactly what makes it a hack and not a crime: the system works as designed, it is just that nobody designed it for the people. The fix is simple to state and hard to impose: bring decisions closer to those who bear them, hold referendums on issues that change a civilisation, create a mandatory register for every influence actor —including NGOs— with their funding sources, and close the revolving door. Until then, European democracy will remain a user interface sitting on top of a system that runs for someone else.