In a burning house, European leaders are negotiating how much money could be made available for water damage if the fire was put out.

The accusation that they have lost contact with the citizens is not true.

You never had him.

It is the system that neither provides for nor allows for legitimate representation of the European population.

Whoever claims or is given the leading role in the EU's decisive body, the European Council, is not elected in twenty-six of the twenty-seven member states.

Anyone who is “democratically legitimate”, i.e. elected, who makes European politics only got into this position through national elections and has to defend the fiction of “national interests” in order to survive politically.

Thus those who are supposed to further develop the post-national European project are in contradiction to the idea of ​​the project: overcoming nationalism.

Anyone who obstructs community interests today at European Council summits in order to get the approval of their national electorate harms everyone else - and ultimately also their own country due to the economic interdependencies of the European single market and the euro zone.

Voters become stupid from harm

And the voters who cheer him stupid from harm.

Today, no European nation state can solve a problem on its own.

But the institutional structure of the EU hampers common solutions.

What we call a crisis today is this contradiction, and what we are discussing are only its symptoms.

It tears Europe apart.

Chasms open up between the political representatives, who see themselves as pragmatists, the citizens and a few dreamers.

We owe the crisis to the pragmatists.

Or weren't they pragmatists who always only decided what was "possible"?

For example, a transnational currency that cannot possibly work but only undermines its very idea because national concerns have prevented the tools that would be necessary to manage the currency.

Instead, problems that arise from this contradiction are renationalized, debts are declared the fault of nations and they are forced into national efforts against which people are rightly taking to the streets.

How do these pragmatists intend to solve the crisis?

Political pressure from below?

We owe the citizens only the legitimation of the crisis producers.

They force their representatives to mimic the defense of national interests, turn away from Europe and, if they are not satisfied with resentment, demand a renationalization of their opportunities for political participation and a strengthening of plebiscitary democracy.

That would come close to the European idea of ​​subsidiarity if it weren't so anti-European.