Opinion – Latinoamérica21: Elections are not the problem

With the perspective of half a century since the beginning of the “third wave” of democratization, there is now ample evidence that confirms a remarkable degree of goodness of the electoral processes.

The well-known term that Samuel Huntington popularized to refer to the political changes that took place in the countries of southern Europe from 1973 onwards, and then in Latin America, and three decades later in Central and Eastern Europe, remains useful for understanding the current situation.

Although democracy is not going through its best moment, according to the different indicators that measure the performance of the complex network of institutions that help to define it, it does not seem that elections occupy the central place in the list of reasons for concern that democracy democracy is going through a state of fatigue, erosion or even dangerous regression.

It is very possible to find imperfections linked to electoral performance that could pose serious questions to that, but I dare to argue that these criticisms as a whole do not have a substantive impact. Cases of accusations of electoral fraud or simply poor performance in the polls are rare.

Negative assessments of democracy focus on other aspects to which I will return shortly.

In particular, and with respect to the strictly electoral aspect, I believe that there are two situations that continue to draw my attention: the inequality in competition and the spurious use of electoral mechanics.

Regarding the first, one of the small lessons of the last midterm elections in the United States, and which was not neglected in the different analyses, is the fact that 96% of the electoral campaigns for the race for a seat in the House of Representatives were earned by whoever spent the most.

As for the second, the ineffable Elon Musk had fun with the electoral game by using his recently acquired social network to ask the people, in his own words, whether he should reinstate former President Donald Trump’s Twitter account.

The result of that particular plebiscite, held on November 19, in which there were 15,085,458 votes, favored Trump’s return thanks to the support of 51.8% of that “sui generis” community. Musk tweeted the news, adding a Latin slogan that referred to the familiar link between the divine voice and the voice of the people. The trivialization of the electoral mechanism was served.

Democracy is certainly more than elections.

The University of Gothenburg, in Sweden, has been running, for a decade now, in an interesting way and validated by a solid theoretical baggage, a research project that proposes to approach the analysis of democracy assuming that it can be divided into five varieties that respond to different questions.

Although these are complementary issues, by sectioning democracy according to its electoral, deliberative, egalitarian, participatory and representative components, it is outlining a clear path to understanding something complex.

The old expression that democracy had to do with the periodic, clean, secret, free and equal election of those who govern, without neglecting the constitutive principles of the rule of law, now enunciated aspects that alluded to the tangled world of political representation where government and opposition would configure a fight of alternation, as well as the mechanisms of popular participation that would avoid the monopoly of politics in the hands of professional politicians.

The visibility of the electoral issue, however, usually overshadows the scenario. The so-called “democracy party”, as the electoral journey centered on the ritual of voting and the logic that some win and others lose is sometimes called, hides the fact that democracy involves more things.

Aspects ranging from daily activities linked to the operation of very diverse institutions (city councils, congresses, governments, courts, parties, autonomous bodies…) to the exercise of citizenship, both individually and in a group, explain different values ​​that constitute a particular political culture.

Also present is the very yield of decisions that take power and that, in one way or another, satisfy or not the demands of the people.

Insofar as elections depend for their development on a network of rules and people who perform supervisory and control tasks for them to work, focusing on policy issues in these instances is a common resource.

Electoral processes become the focus of media attention, stimulated by the supposed bad performance of unscrupulous political actors eager to profit from a given situation.

The two most relevant countries in Latin America in demographic and economic terms live, in this sense, a similar experience.

Still-president Jair Bolsonaro, continuing his defamatory activism against the Brazilian electoral system, which has sown doubts about his performance since his election in 2018, legally questioned the result of last October’s elections without providing any evidence.

President López Obrador, for his part, demonizes the National Electoral Institute and its president Lorenzo Córdova, who is trusted by 76% of citizens and who since 2014 has organized 330 elections without incident, and promotes a rapid electoral reform without consensus with the opposition.

This is another step in the country’s drift toward discretion, taking it back to a bygone era when elections were a power game.

Neither in Brazil nor in Mexico are elections the problem. Systemic corruption, stubborn inequality, as well as, especially in Mexico, everyday disappearances and murders are what they are.