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Well, the EU President is not elected at all, so that's kind of a bad comparison.
Size of the country doesn't have much to do with why US elections take so long. It's the system for selecting candidates. A series of 50+ state by state elections to select delegates to attend a convention to nominate a candidate is just always going to take longer than a small number of party insiders deciding internally who it's going to be.
Yes, that would be my point
I think it's a great comparison, precisely for the reason you outline later on. The American system is a leftover from an era when the country was a lot more disjointed. If the executive of the EU was elected, you'd end up with something similar, for very similar reasons. Superficially the EU is a union, but different countries have different cultures and sometimes different interests. If you try to run a union-wide campaign, it's going to end up being either full of completely empty platitudes in the best case, or stoking ethnic tensions in the worst.
Given the size differentials between countries, you'd also inevitably end up with something like the electoral college, because "one man, one vote" just gives you "do what the Germans tell you", and that's not a particularly enticing system for anyone. Maybe instead of delegates they'd just give a vote multiplier to certain countries, and that would simplify things relative to the USA, but it's pretty clear they'd come up with some analogue.
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