biefstukfriet

you were asked to name 15 politicians from your own parliament; yet you name balkenende who a member of the executive branch, don't know about the others

******

I think a major problem is also that many ordinary voters in the different nations are too delusional or too astranged from politics to make a rational judgement on how to vote on this treaty;

I see that spanish truckers launched a strike "against high oil prices" that cost the economy 1 billion euro, yet what will this strike achieve? If the politicians have any backbone they will refuse to take any short term measures and at best increase support for research/development of alternative fuels or fuel efficient cars or whatever; if they don't have any backbone they will simply take short term measures that effectively subsidise this striking sector at the expense of everyone else taking away incentives to be fuel efficient and ending up increasing the oil prices even more in the long term

the spanish government has litterally no power whatsoever to actually bring down the oil prices, at best they can subsidise and alleviate a short term sting by turning it into a bigger and more expensive problem in the long term

bundeling power in an efficient institution is always going to bring everyone much further than where you would end up if standing alone; yet people don't want to see this and are hesitant to give up their access to short term easy solutions and increase the efficiency of the government level that is able to better tackle these problems but where their power to coax politicians into localised, short term solutions is greatly reduced

I think if the calculations were made the EU institutions have litterally increased the wealth of EU citizens by hundreds of billions if not more over the decades (the free EU market greatly reduced costs for everything and complications for companies, the euro has saved many companies from the fickle nature of the currency markets that in the past could easily push healthy companies into bankruptcy if they happened to have too much of their business in the wrong nation), all the while costing only a fraction of the EU members GDP