First of all, thank you for phrasing in such a constructive way with "seems to be". I really appreciate that about this community.

I'll try to clarify:

The EU in many ways does operate like a government, at least like a confederacy. It has a legislative process, a directly elected parliament, and a president. We get "state of the union" addresses, for crying out loud!

But its founding mission was as an independent third party to oversee coal and steal production. That kind of "referee" role between member states is central to how it is designed, and to much of its action.

Some notable dissimilarities to a democratic government:

- The EU has no constitution; it has treaties.
- The EU has no sovereignty; limited powers flow upwards from individual member states.
- The EU may only determine matters collectively which need to be determined collectively (principle of subsidiarity)
- The only directly elected part of the EU (the EU Parliament) may not propose legislation. It gets to amend, improve, and approve/reject legislation proposed by the (unelected) EU Commission, to implement policy set by the European Council and its (unelected) president.
- The "supreme executive" European Council is simply all the national leaders with an appointed head. That's the only source for new policy and leadership decisions.
- The EU Commission - the partner body to the EU parliament, is a set of appointees from the EU Council, approved/rejected as a group by the parliament.

The idea behind the setup is to make it easier to propose and ratify multi-lateral treaties with many sides and fixed membership. The directly elected Parliament is a sanity check, not a source of legislation.

To use the US system as analogy because I can assume broad familiarity with it:
- the executive branch is all the state governors. They appoint the President.
- the senate is made of appointees from the executive branch, approved as a group by the congress.
- the house of representatives is directly elected, and can only modify, approve, or reject legislation proposed by the senate.

It is not a controversial opinion to say it is a hybrid system. In fact, from the Wikipedia page on the EU:

"The EU operates through a hybrid system of supranational and intergovernmental decision-making,[132][133] and according to the principles of conferral (which says that it should act only within the limits of the competences conferred on it by the treaties) and of subsidiarity (which says that it should act only where an objective cannot be sufficiently achieved by the member states acting alone)."

"Constitutionally, the EU bears some resemblance to both a confederation and a federation, but has not formally defined itself as either... It is more integrated than a traditional confederation of states because the general level of government widely employs qualified majority voting in some decision-making among the member states... It is less integrated than a federal state because it is not a state in its own right."

Also, as evidenced by some of the other responses to my comment, my statement that we need a central political body is a controversial opinion.

Hope this helps. Thanks for the excuse for a Wikipedia dive! You may also be interested in this recent Economist article about some of the problems of the dichotomy: https://www.economist.com/europe/2020/09/03/the-contradictio...