Former Greek Finance minister Yanis Varoufakis on his experience on dealing with the EU...
When Schauble welcomed me with his "it is my mandate against yours" doctrine, he was honouring a long EU tradition of neglecting democratic mandates in the name of respecting them. Like all dangerous hypotheses, it is founded on an obvious truth: the voters of one country cannot give their representative a mandate to impose upon other governments conditions that the latter have no mandate, from their own electorate, to accept. But while this is a truism, its incessant repetition by Brussels functionaries, such as Angela Merkel and Schauble himself, is intended to convert it surreptitiously into a very different notion: no voters from any country can empower their government to oppose Brussels.
For all their concerns with rules, treaties, processes, competitiveness, freedom of movement, terrorism, etc, only one prospect truly terrifies the EU's deep establishment: democracy. They speak in its name to exorcise it, and suppress it.