Year XVI-Issue,02-2000

Discouraged electors and increasing abstentionism in the West, a feeling of extraneousness in the rest of the world: the government system invented by the Greeks and adopted almost everywhere is going through a difficult period. 

"Democracy " Winston Churchill said once "is the worst system of government, apart all the others ". That many citizens in many different western countries are starting thinking the same is surely worrying, even if by now it does not come out by giving votes to totalitarian political formations, as it happened in Germany in 1933, but only by abstentionism. Already since years, the number of electors refusing going to the polls is increasing almost everywhere, with peaks decidedly "pathologic" as for example the participation of the Northern populations to the early European elections.

It must be said that in many countries the phenomenon is quite ancient. For example it is almost forty years that the United States presidents are elected by not more than the half of those having right to vote, without loosing legitimacy for that and that the legendary Switzerland referenda have had more or less the same luck. In the "normal" countries a turnout between 60% and 75% is deemed usually quite satisfying, since it is calculated that one third citizens is disinterested at all in policy or is too indolent to make his duty, or prefers anyhow to take care of "his private " and is sure that things will go on the same also without his vote. 
The Italian case, besides regarding us closely, is meaningful. Our country has always distinguished itself for a very high turnout at the electoral competitions. 85-90 percentages were, during the First Republic, normalcy, especially in the North Regions. Still in 1993, at the Segni referendum concerning the electoral system, and in March 1994 when there was the first big clash between right and left under the new electoral rules, electors went to the polls massively. If in few years we passed to a turnout less than the European Union average it means that the relationship between Palace and citizens has decayed and that it's time to take measures.
The "no-voters party " is already and by far the strongest in the country and even providing a physiologic abstentionism equal to 10-15 per cent, who will succeed in getting it back to the polls would have the passport to power. Neither the referenda, that are deemed as an "anti-system tool ", and hence who has lost trust in policy would like them, recall people attention, a little because they are too many, a little because they have become too much specialist and a little because their output is often disregarded and circumvented.
Many opinion surveys and analysts' studies tried to individuate the reasons for abstentionism, by they did not go beyond the obvious: too frequent elections, disinterest to or even contempt for policy, dissatisfaction toward all parties, distrust in the possibility to influence the situation by the means of one's own vote, sensation of being sent up. 
To complete the summary of the situation, it must be counted in other two factors: the decay or even the disappearing of the ancient apparatus that at elections succeeded in moving mass to polls, and the feeling (wrong at all but most people is not aware of it) that ending the East-West clash and the dissolving the ancient PCI the basic values of freedom and democracy are not at risk anymore.

The events of the current legislature have furthermore contributed to increase the abstentionism phenomena. First, there has been the disappointment of the Polo's electors that even if they won by numbers, have been defeated by an electoral law allowing tricks like that of the discontinuance. 
Second, there has been the anger of many centrist electors of the Ulivo, that having given their vote to a coalition leaded by Romano Prodi, found two years and a half later a government - the only one in Europe - leaded by an ex-communist. 
Add to this the feeling, already quite spread, that policy has turned really into a puppet theatre, as Berlusconi says, where they talk they talk they talk, wasting often in polemics having no interest for the average elector, and putting in act very few changes. In any country press gives a lot of space to interviews to and comments by political men, often second range, promising, criticizing, stigmatising, pointing out measures to take against the problems of the country. The same happens on television, where everyday big and little leaders pontificate about things to do in front of a "controlled" public applauding or protesting. But, standing the test of facts, few or nothing happens. Fiscal drag goes on being hardly bearable, bureaucracy goes on being a hindrance for Italy notwithstanding everybody's denunciations, the reforms invoked almost unanimously remain on wait. The most worrying aspect is maybe the disenchantment of the young; in their imagination the protagonists of the policy show the worst features, that is those attributed to them by the opponents in the most inflamed polemic moments; and when the X hour gets, they neither know who choose. The Italian situation, heightened as often all Italian matters, is not the sole in the western countries, where the disenchantment for policy seems even increasing with welfare: "Why must people go to polls " Brian Thomas, the Britannic political commentator, asks himself, "when he knows that, whoever wins, things must not change a lot, because of the international binds prevailing over programs and differences between Right and Left even more hard to sense?"

Those having lost their trust in vote as a tool to change things do not go to poll, and in an increasing measure. It will be very interesting for example to see how many German electors till now having voted for the CDU will decide for abstentionism after the shock of the party illegal counts and the embezzlements of Chancellor Kohl.

If then from the west world we go to the rest of the globe where democracy is comparatively an early achievement and not always compatible with local traditions, we find an even more worrying situation. It does not concern a matter of going to polls, but of its intrinsic meaning, since the unreadiness of electors, the strong compulsion by the power and more in general the infinitive possibilities of manoeuvre. Often they quote the example of India that has kept intact the parliamentary system inherited from the Britannic Empire and that since fifty years calls general election regularly, producing also a physiologic alternation of power. But to evaluate the real value of these elections it's necessary having attended one of them, preferably in a rural constituency. Provided that almost the half of the electors is illiterate, on the voting papers there are not writings but only symbols, preferably drawings of animals. All the political pressures systems are good and the weight of money is often decisive. The output is that the Parliament of Delhi, where a deputy represents more than a million individuals, seems representative of the country but really it's only representative of a whole of clans.

In Africa, where democracy has been imposed during the fifties and the sixties as a condition for decolonisation it has never really rooted, since there' s no likeness with the tribal structure of society. In many States, arbitrary established by the colonial powers, parliaments are reduced to a mere place of comparison of the interests of the different ethnical groups, a comparison that can quickly degenerate into a clash. Even more often the multiparty democracy the westerns tried to spread has degenerated into a unique party system, soviet kind, where deputies are not other but clones of who commands. It happens too that presidents having achieved a first investiture, more or less regularly, create then a piloted democracy serving only to legitimate their power outward. Only apparently things have improved in Latin America, where the cult of the "caudillo" is exhausting; but the case of Venezuela where a new one has installed availing of perfectly democratic instruments, advises us that this progress is far from being consolidated. By now it's not the chance to derive apocalyptic conclusions from what is happening. It's probably that the age of democracy (and don't forget it started very few time ago) will endure still for a long time, and maybe will succeed in consolidating. But the fact that - by now - it does not work well and needs timely correctives must not be absolutely ignored.