64In the third place, as regards the appellants’ argument that the interpretation of the ECI mechanism by the General Court in the judgment under appeal deprives that mechanism of any effectiveness, it must be recalled that, as stated in Article 10(1) TEU, the functioning of the Union is to be based on representative democracy, which gives concrete expression to democracy as a value. Democracy is, under Article 2 TEU, one of the values on which the Union is founded.
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