No one disputes that the European Union has a “democratic deficit”: a lack of direct accountability to voters. Citizens are often unaware of how the commission and the European Parliament function, or of which groupings their parties belong to. But that is largely because making things simpler would require pooling politics in one European arena, and the politicians and citizens of different European countries do not want to do that.
There is no common European people to act as the subject of democratic politics, and different nations do not trust each other enough to create one...Eurosceptics have a valid case against the EU, but not because its leaders are “unelected bureaucrats”. Rather, its bureaucrats are too insulated from democracy, and its democracy is not functioning well enough without a common demos to make it work.