Although this double-majority voting system for the EBA sounds boringly procedural, it could prove to be very significant.

BBC: Eurozone banking union that works for Britain?

Because, under Germany's system of proportional representation, the Greens got 47 parliamentary seats, but under France's majority-voting system its Greens, the main environmental party, got a mere half-dozen.

ECONOMIST: France

The Council of Ministers uses a system of weighted qualified-majority voting in which small countries are heavily over-represented.

ECONOMIST: By the esoteric art of treaty revision

The government, led by the Kaczynski twins' conservative party Law and Justice (PiS), had previously opposed the constitutional treaty on the grounds that the voting method it contained a double majority system based on the number of countries and their population size would favour larger countries such as France and Germany at the expense of medium-sized countries such as Poland.

ECONOMIST: Will Poland��s government block a new EU treaty?