Democracy is easy enough to define – or should be. We all know what it means. The online Cambridge University dictionary offers this definition:
A system of government in which power is held by elected representatives who are freely voted for by the people, or helddirectly by the people themselves.
However, the actual practice of democracy is another thing. Indeed, in western democracies – the supposed benchmark – the practice is becoming a much-devalued thing, not least in Europe. This was shockingly evident after the Brexit referendum: for four years, Parliament and most of our elected representatives therein tried to thwart the referendum result with appalling contempt for the democratic process, hiding behind fabricated virtues of ‘parliamentary scrutiny’ which amounted, in effect, to a coup by the legislature against the executive, intent on ensuring never-ending legislative blocking of Brexit until it was either drastically diluted or overturned. The EU was fully behind this scam, as it is behind any number of worrying anti-democratic initiatives in Europe.
In the last few years, the EU has overturned democratic processes in Italy and Greece, and has bullied Poland and Hungary, when electorates there have voted in governments of which the EU does not approve. Currently, Georgia and Romania are in the EU’s anti-democratic crosshairs.
In Georgia, the election in October 2024 brought in the Russo-friendly Georgian Dream party with 54% of the vote. That there were indeed irregularities in the voting process seems clear; however, it would appear these were not enough to change the outcome. There, the new president is firmly anti-EU – and so the EU agitates to dismiss him and install a pro-EU president instead. It is provoking further unrest.
Romania is a more clear-cut case of anti-democracy in action. In November, another EU sceptical, Kremlin-friendly candidate, Calin Georgescu, won the first round of the presidential election. Cue more ‘Russian interference’ in the electoral process – as with voting irregularities in all elections, there is always outside interference – and the courts and elites trying to overthrow the election outcome. Thus, in March, they banned Georgescu from standing in the follow-up election, having already annulled the first-round election results. Again, the EU has been fully supportive of measures to suppress a country’s electoral wishes.
Right-wing, anti-elitist populist parties are the target for the EU and its fellow-travelling ruling classes. Democracy, when the vote doesn’t go their way, is an inconvenient obstacle to be circumvented. Hungary and Germany’s AfD are on their ‘to-do’ list. As former EU commissioner Thierry Breton – as smug a representative of the entitled ruling elites as one could hope to find – recently declared: ‘We did it in Romania and we will obviously do it in Germany if necessary.’
Democracy is meant to ensure that, through a fair electoral process, political entities that attract the largest proportion of votes can rule, with the defeated elements accepting the result. One’s personal distaste for a victorious party is neither here nor there: democracy can only function if its results are acknowledged. The worrying trend these days is for losers in elections to automatically claim that the elections were not fair in the first place, thereby undermining the democratic process. Too much of this could prove fatal for democracy.
