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A big issue with Switzerland is that the EU lacks direct democracy i.e. the ability for the people to force a vote.
It's actually pretty awesome. I mean sometimes they end up forcing a vote on stupid things but generally it's a safeguard that allows the people to block legal changes. So a situation like the Trump tariffs couldn't happen in Switzerland if the majority of the population objected.
Personally, I think the EU would be a stronger democracy if they added it, and the odds of Switzerland joining would increase substantially.
The most direct tools the EU has is an European Citizens' Initiative. With that citizens can directly propose a directive or regulation to the European Commission. If that goes well, citizens will meet EU officials, have a public hearing at the European Parliament to explain their initiative. Within half a year the commission has to reply, but they always can reject the proposal. It requires 1 million valid signatures and they have to be from at minimum 7 EU countries. That’s 0.2% of the voters and 25% of the member states.
That indeed differs from how a popular initiative in Switzerland works. The % of needed signatures is 5 times higher, but if it gets rejected a popular vote would follow. That kind of vote would be hard to transform into EU rules. For this Swiss popular vote a majority of given votes has to be yes, but additionally there has to be a majority in the majority of the Kantons. Switzerland already has some population differences between their Kantons, Jura has less than half the population of Zürich. In EU that is a lot more extreme, Germany has 158 times the population of Malta. In EU half of the members would be 14 countries and the smallest 14 countries only represent 11.5% of the total population.
EU doesn’t even have a uniform voting system. The elections to the European Parliament already are distorted because the value of a single vote depends on the size country it’s from. Generally it’s proportional voting, but the details differ by country and that includes whether they use open lists, semi-open lists or closed lists and they use different formulas to allocate the seats. In regard to the voting rules that is probably the most diverse vote in the world. Some countries split themselves further into parts, so different regions vote for only a part of their seats. Active (16-18) and passive (18-25) voting ages differ. Belgium has compulsory voting. When you reside in a different country you can either vote their or in your home country. Since the voting age differs, that means some can vote earlier than other citizens from their country. They don’t even vote on the same day, a few vote for longer than just one day. Availability and form of absentee voting differs. Some countries have compulsory voting. A few countries vote with single tranferable vote, some do panachage, but most do open lists.
Fine by me