What I see people (Europeans) lamenting is how undemocratic the EU is. As much as I think von der Leyen should be imprisoned, the issue is not the people in the government, but the institution itself. The Commission and the Council are the ones pushing these things, every time.

The people in government are bad, and there's no reason whatsoever to think that'll improve amy time soon: what prevents bad people from doing bad things is the regulatory apparatus of checks and balances, which the EU very much lacks (in parts, granted). Worse, it has introduced US style corruption (or "lobbying") into countries that historically lacked it.

If Chat Control 2.0 passes, given the general direction this would be showing, I'd very much understand people wanting to exit from the EU and cut the amount of undemocratic bullshit they have to contend with.

But to return to your point, when something people strongly reject happens in their country, they do, rightfully, advocate for the dissolution of that government. Much harder to do with unelected bureaucrats sheltering in another country.

The Euroskeptics want to go about this backwards. They correctly see the anti-democratic nature of the current EU structure and conclude that this is the only way European integration could happen, ergo we should not integrate Europe. The problem with this is that, even as 27 individual sovereigns, the former EU member states would still need to form agreements with one another and with other countries. Except this negotiation process is completely outside the democratic process even more than the EU currently is.

The underlying problem is that democracies do not stack or sum. Two democracies negotiating with one another become a dictatorship of whoever is doing the negotiating. The only way to preserve democracy is to give the people of both countries equal control over the matters assigned to the whole. The people must rule as one or they cease to rule at all.

The EU is handicapped by its very diversity on this. Imagine the situation where the EU is integrated, and the government wants to pass Chat Control 2.0, or some equally unsavoury measure. Imagine that some people or orgs manage to whip up the people of the Netherlands into protesting in the streets against it: it's extremely unlikely that Poles or Spaniards would be able to build a protest movement on top of that, if they were even aware of it, because of language and national sentiment ("it's just some people over there being angry about whatever, and mainstream media says there's nothing to see there, or that they're evil terrorists, and I don't understand their funny language enough to check").

There are some promising moves towards a EU-wide party in Mera25 for example (if I understand it correctly), but it's ultimately a party for English-speaking, basically well-off, educated, currently left-leaning, young people, which is nothing that one can build a deep movement on.

Thousands of years of cultural heritage can't be bulldozed over and turned into a faceless economic zone similar to the US, just because the business class elites see it as a disadvantage to advancing their WEF globalist agenda where every person on the planet is to be an identical blank slate in an excel sheet and there's no borders, no religion, no identity, and no intellectual, educational, cultural and behavioral differences and all everyone just compete to be cattle in a race to the bottom for their corporate and real estate empires. This will always get pushback, mostly via voting far right.

If you want to convince people to freely give up their culture and identity in the name of EU economic advancement, you need to give them an incentive, a big economic one, and the EU sucks at this, and ambitious people looking for money go to the US, Dubai, etc. Money in the EU is still gatekept based on where you live and what nationality you have. EU will never go anywhere if still keeps this caste system where western/northern europeans are the noble gentry and eastern/southern europe the cheap labor peasants without any skin the game as they just become mercenaries who will sell their talent to US, China, etc anyone how will pay them better than Europeans.

>it's ultimately a party for English-speaking, basically well-off, educated, currently left-leaning, young people, which is nothing that one can build a deep movement on

Out-of-touch theater kids from upper class families who never did any hard labor jobs and spent their lives in an eternal Erasmus travel and party program, aren't gonna be popular with anyone but their own bubble as nobody who's struggling to pay bills, deal with unemployment from layoffs or lack of safety in public spaces due to migration, will ever empathize with them. It's the same posh European nobility cohort the hugely unpopular and equally out of touch Ursula von der Leyen comes from, where she grew up living abroad, traveling, partying and studying surrounded by private security, and then lectures the working class on "difficult decisions". We would guillotine people like that for less.

?! Yes. Well, to some of us maybe not yet chat control given some proper well conceived legislation. But age verification, yes, may be one of the reasons to ask for dissolution.

You can't separate the EU from what people use it to do.