Politics & Power Quote by Mario Monti

Monti’s sentence is the bureaucrat’s version of a shield held up to a familiar charge: the EU is run by unelected technocrats. He doesn’t try to win the argument on passion; he wins it on procedure. “As to the question” signals a courtroom posture, narrowing the debate to a technical point of legitimacy. The pivot is carefully engineered: not “elected,” perhaps, but “appointed jointly” and “undergone individual scrutiny,” capped with the clincher, “a vote of confidence.” It’s a rhetorical substitution of chain-of-custody for popular mandate.

The intent is defensive, but not meek. By stacking verbs - appointed, scrutinized, voted - Monti constructs legitimacy as a process, not a plebiscite. The subtext is that critics are either misinformed or pretending not to understand how representative governance can be indirect. He invokes two sources of authority at once: national governments (democratic by proxy) and the European Parliament (democratic by election), implying the Commission is doubly vetted. That “15 member states” date-stamps the remark in an EU still small enough to name and still haunted by the Maastricht-era fear that integration was outpacing consent.

Context matters because the Commission sits at the EU’s awkward center: powerful enough to propose rules, insulated enough to look remote. Monti’s phrasing tries to turn that remoteness into virtue - expertise filtered through political oversight. It’s also a quiet admission: the Commission can’t claim the romance of direct election, so it must claim the rigor of accountability. In an era of rising Euroskepticism, that’s not pedantry; it’s crisis management in formalwear.