In the UK in a landslide election, about 70% of MPs retain their seats. The only threat to the majority of Tory and Labour MPs at a given election is the threat of deselection by about 300 local party members.

Depending on the country there may be a party list system, but in somewhere like Ireland you vote for the individual members via a very democratic STV.

That some national governments have instituted a closed list system instead is a failing of those national governments, who want to keep the power with themselves rather than with the people.

> In the UK in a landslide election, about 70% of MPs retain their seats.

If 30% are voted out then that suggests more (perhaps 60%?) were at risk of being voted out to the point where it would influence their decisions.

> The only threat to the majority of Tory and Labour MPs at a given election is the threat of deselection by about 300 local party members.

Which is again a big improvement in accountability over what MEPs face.

> Depending on the country there may be a party list system, but in somewhere like Ireland you vote for the individual members via a very democratic STV.

By which you mean every country in the EU except Ireland and Belgium uses a party list system, and even the Belgian system is mostly party list based (just split by language as well).

> If 30% are voted out then that suggests more (perhaps 60%?) were at risk of being voted out to the point where it would influence their decisions.

No, that's not how elections in the UK work

> Which is again a big improvement in accountability over what MEPs face.

MPs get to be voted out by their local parties

MEPs in Ireland get to be voted out by the voters without the failures of the undemocratic FPTP system

That's not a problem with the EU, it's a problem with the individual countries. Just like the power resting with the council (like nominating head of commission. The rest of the commissioners are more like US Secretarys who are nominated by the president and approved by congress)

This is a failure with the nation states, similar to the days when states appointed electoral college directly from their senate rather than via popular vote.

> No, that's not how elections in the UK work

Incumbents losing 100% of elections would not be a sign of a healthy democracy; the obvious candidate for an ideal target would be 50% (given that the post-2010 UK is a de facto two-party system). So 30% is not so bad relative to that.

> MEPs in Ireland get to be voted out by the voters without the failures of the undemocratic FPTP system

Ireland's 13 MEPs are democratically accountable (though even then, an individual voter must split their attention 13 ways). The other 692 aren't.

> That's not a problem with the EU, it's a problem with the individual countries. Just like the power resting with the council (like nominating head of commission. The rest of the commissioners are more like US Secretarys who are nominated by the president and approved by congress)

So what's the practical fix? The EU passed a lot of unpopular measures for which no-one was visibly accountable (and it really doesn't matter if there was some legal mechanism for the UK to avoid implementing them, given that actually exercising any such mechanism was outside the Overton window of UK politics). Leaving the EU was a crude sledgehammer that's had a lot of collateral damage, but how else could UK voters have got away from laws written by party cronies and voted on by other party cronies? The EU's lack of accountability is not a superficial flaw that they're working on fixing; it's deep-rooted and it's hard to escape the idea that the powers that be like it that way.