Democracies hardly tolerate drama

In many democracies around the world today we have "la lutte finale".

The memorable line about "the last color" from the old socialist anthem "The Internationale" is a fitting refrain for most contemporary democratic political processes.

Kicking off his new presidential campaign, Donald Trump told supporters they faced a grim choice - either secure victory or "our country will be lost forever."

This, he said, is "the last battle".

A similar cry could be heard in Paris, where hundreds of thousands of people have demonstrated for weeks against President Emmanuel Macron's decision to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64. Protesters also harbor an antipathy to his imperial, "Jupiterian" style of rule.

The "last fight" is also in Israel, where a large number of citizens are determined to prevent the right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu from reforming - or, as they see it, subjugating - the judiciary. And "now or never" is also in Turkey, where autocrat Recep Tayyip Erdogan stands against the democratic opposition.

But is it really the case that the participants of those gatherings and demonstrations, according to their true conviction, have nothing more to lose?

Having voted last week in Bulgaria's parliamentary elections, the fifth in the last two years (and there are still no guarantees that a government will be formed), I began to wonder if this passion to preserve democracy is even compatible with the job of governing in a democratic country. to the states. Can democracy function if the majority of citizens believe that losing an election equals losing the state?

The 19th century French thinker Alexis de Tocqueville was one of the first to point out that the democratic process needs drama. But democracy should also be de-dramatized.

The day after the election, when all the doom and gloom, the Sturm und Drang campaigns suddenly disappear, the problems start to seem solvable and the world magically returns to normal. Functional democracy requires political actors trained in the manner of Bertold Brecht, not Konstantin Stanislavsky. In other words, they should be able to distance themselves in the campaign.

Unfortunately, the magic of the post-election return to normalcy seems lost.

The democratic political process today is overwhelmed by a sense of extreme necessity in which there is no room for compromise. It is politics as a clash of two apocalyptic imaginations.

On the left, climate activists believe that if we don't act now, as soon as tomorrow there will be no more human life on earth. Nativists on the right, on the other hand, are not driven by the fear of the end of life itself, but that "our way of life" could end.

Both of them share the feeling that we are fighting the "last fight". And while some concerns on both sides are very real and require swift social action, radicalism has become the main way to deal with the complex and confusing.

The problem is that democracy cannot function either when the stakes are too low or when they are too high. Democracy loses credibility when only governments change and nothing else. But he also loses his self-control when everything changes with the change of government.

In a democracy, election losers accept defeat primarily because losing does not mean losing too much - and in any case, new elections are never far away.

The art of democracy is to leave the future open. It is the job of elections to turn madness into reason and to translate passion into interest. Voting gives every citizen a voice, but deprives him of the ability to show the intensity of his convictions. The voice of a fanatic for whom elections are a matter of life and death and the voice of a citizen who barely knows who he is voting for and why have the same weight.

The result is that voting has a dual character: it allows us to replace those in power, thereby protecting us from an overly repressive state, but it also keeps passions in check and protects us from overly repressive citizens. Democracy, in the ideal sense, induces the apathetic to take an interest in public life, while cooling the passions of fanatics.

When elections are just a carnival of passions, effective government is impossible. And while it is true that we live in turbulent times and the pressure for radical action is real, "C'est la lutte finale" is the wrong refrain.

The author is the president of the Center for Liberal Strategies in Sofia and a permanent associate of the Institute for Humanities in Vienna

(novimagazin.rs)