By Ali Al Hadi Ismail | Staff Writer
A fathomless concern about the futuristic scene of democracy has been the topic of serious debate worldwide in recent years. Liberalism and democracy in their current dimensions fell short when it came to gratifying nations with stability and prosperity. Even in developed and industrialized countries, the deep-rooted embraced democracy doesn’t seem to be a resolution for the contemporary challenges and troubles compounding each day.
I cast my mind back in time ten years back, very precisely around July 2011. The entire globe was calling Gaddafi for deposition and conducting firm transposition towards democratized Libya. He was later on captured and murdered and Libya was swapped to a second drastic multi-sided six-year-long civil war. Besides, no one can contradict the autocrat of Gaddafi. However, we can’t ignore that Libya was much better under his dictatorship in terms of security and economy. The attempt to insert democracy in Libya’s political body promulgated by Western countries was completely in vain in regards to these outcomes.
It fritters away time to discuss every example of the faded democracy around the globe ranging from Yemen to Venezuela. However, it is not amiss to discuss another recent scene manifested in Sudan, the site where thousands of casualties are agonized as yet for the sake of the forged artwork of democracy manifested to them by the foreign leaders. It was sorrowfully unclouded to catch the sight of unarmed masses of pro-democratic demonstrators being fired with a live round and tear gas by the Sudanese military government entitled to initiate the structure of democratic transition, which makes the irony. Further, the peaceful handover of power to civilians just ahead of democratic elections was impeded by a military coup, aggravating the situation even more. The notion traced from the aforementioned scenes can be assembled in a few words: transitions to democracy have gone beyond displaying a ruling of people incorporating their wills and inclinations.
To pinpoint the actual ailing afflicting the body of democracy, an internet-based survey was conducted across 14 industrialized democracies. Of a total amounting to 8,456 participants, 4,871 people show dissatisfaction with the current form of democracy, which accounts for a median of 58% dissatisfied individuals. Roughly, only 28% of the surveyed people claimed that individuals elected care about the public and act to benefit citizens, which is an obvious evidence of how a representative could act against electors’ will.
Besides, even elections held for the sake of choosing a representative could end sometimes against public preferences. For instance, Hillary Clinton would have been the 45th president of the United States if all eligible voter ballots were taken into account. Hillary Clinton would have won with a margin of 2 millions votes ahead of Donald Trump if it weren’t for the fact that he was favored by the college voting system deployed in the US Constitution. As many people revealed a distrust in the system of choosing a representative, direct democracy would drift into the orbit of consideration with an increase in total stocks when it comes to subscriptions of its public shares.
Direct democracy, also known as a pure democracy, is a class of democracy whereby people decide policies by direct voting without any intermediary such as an elected representative. It is in contrast with representative democracy established mainly in developed countries known as the Western-style democracy.
Representative democracy consists of electing an individual to assume power in the name of citizens by eligible people, whereby the elected person is responsible for conducting authority and management instead of people. Pure democracy comes in a total difference based on the conception when it is related to power. Every eligible person of the whole community participates in the process of making political decisions without the involvement of a proxy and thus demonstrating the public’s will with regard to the sphere of legislation and policies. It functions through the assembly and gathering of people to depict the direct itinerary of policies instead of electing a representative or a candidate entitled to do the same purpose of finding firm resolutions for a variety of issues. So do we need a newfangled approach?