While I agree that this setup is not very good, the EU Commission is essentially the equivalent of a government in a parliamentary or presidential democracy, and almost all such democracies I know about either have or have developed "ways" for the government to "push through" the will of the "chamber(s)". However, we do not consider those as farces as well, or so it seems to me, I guess mostly because those governments are still more or less directly "bootstrapped", and needs to be supported, by the chambers, which is what happens in the EU parliament as well.
No because we know that we have (in France) a president, a prime minister and ministers.
We know what they are in charge of (for the basic ministries), everyone knows who the president is, a lot who the PM is, and nobody knows the current ministers. But we know their jobs. They also refer to stuff which impacts us on a daiky basis.
The EU as a governing body is a mystery. Not only there are pieces that has almost the same name but are different things, they function in a remote world that does not interfere with ours. Like the UN.
The rest of Europe doesn't have presidential system.
Most of the Europeans know who the President of EC (so basically president in France or PM i other countries) is -- everyone hates beloved UvdL ;)
The same goes for comissioners - they mimic same roles as your government has but level up. Some positions may be more prominent (and names known), some less.
Then if you go level _DOWN_ to local authorities (regional, municipal) then people would most likely be clueless who-is-who-and-do-what.
Basically we live in dumbed-down world where people are aware of basically the only-single-strongest-figure (Presindent, PM) because… idiocracy…
I don't know the name of the person who runs utilities because they just work. I sure would know if there was a problem. This is the same with politics: when a country is stable and is moving ahead, people are not interested.
Look at the participation levels in elections: they are always high when there is substantial stuff on the scales. Otherwise it is moot.
That's true. Plus how the media/narrative works. EU is a very convenient scapegote for <everything bad happening in the country>. People are unaware how things works quite often and national politicians are "trigger happy" to blame everything on the EU…
