A European Union flag in front of Big Ben. Daniel Leal-Olivas PA Wire/PA Images. All rights reserved
Manuel Serrano: People are accusing the European Union of a lack of transparency, and a lack of accountability to European citizens. Do you think that there is a democratic deficit in the Union?
Rebecca Abecassis: I would not say that there is a democratic deficit. What I think is that there is bad communication. And we, journalists, have a lot of responsibility for this, because we are not explaining how the European institutions work well enough. If we analyse them in detail, we see they work well and there is quite a lot of transparency. Of course, there are episodes of poor transparency, as was recently the case with the former European Commissioner Neelie Kroes, but in general the institutions are working fairly well. Yes, it is true that there is a lot of bureaucracy and that a lot of the time things do not work as they should. The machinery becomes so heavy that, as a result, things are not easy to understand, giving European citizens the impression that things are not working.
