The European Union’s Double Crisis of Legitimacy - The Atlantic

The union faces a double crisis of legitimacy...

it is hard to sustain the fiction that ordinary citizens have a meaningful say over what happens in Brussels... If many voters don’t believe that they have much sway over what happens in their national capitals, the feeling of impotence is even more profound when it comes to Brussels....

the EU ... indifferent or ineffective in confronting authoritarians who won power in member states... Recent research b... suggests ... EU has made it easier for these strongmen to stay in power ... funnel European subsidies...

Today’s European leaders still like to invoke the memory of their hallowed predecessors... taken the wrong lesson ... Instead of ... courage and imagination, they ... think of the postwar order as a holy relic that must never be touched... been drawing down on the store of trust they inherited for a while...

Countries that violate the basic values on which the EU was founded need to lose their subsidies and their voting rights... a workable mechanism for suspending their membership. The EU also needs to fight against the democratic deficit that pervades its own institutions