Double assessment

Elections are fundamental to any democracy. But the mere fact that elections are held does not mean that democratic rule is firmly in place. For that to be the case, more criteria need to be fulfilled.

For example, the rule of law must be established firmly enough to justify trust in state officials. Manipulation of ballot papers or boxes is a common way of faking results in the government’s favour. Therefore, the branches of government must be separated systematically enough to ensure that the executive branch remains credible even on polling day, when power itself is at stake. It is completely unacceptable for law enforcers to attempt to suppress results by force, or intimidate opposition candidates or their supporters beforehand.

At the same time, the state’s monopoly of force needs to be firmly established too. If well-organised and perhaps even armed pressure groups call elections and their results into question, the outcome has far too often been riots and near civil war. Depressingly, government forces tend to blur with non-governmental units in times of high-running passions. Kenya and Zimbabwe are recent examples.

Elections need to be held regularly in any democracy, to re-set the balance of political parties. Democratic elections are not about appointing a king, dictator or colonial ruler who would then be entitled to plunder the country – and perhaps do their relatives or ethnic group or clan some favours. In countries without democratic tradition, this change of perspective is often difficult – and so it was in many European nations. Where there are no free media to provide space for pluralistic debate, however, even procedurally correct elections are of little democratic merit. Where one-sided reporting on dominant channels defines public discourse, all voting is questionable – whether in Malaysia, Russia or Italy, a member of the EU and NATO.

Elections always measure two things:
– are civil liberties observed – from freedom of speech and assembly to the freedom of association?
– and what is the current balance of political forces in a country?
What interests voters most on the eve of an election, of course, is who will run the country in the next few years. So they focus attention on the second question, which definitely needs to be answered in the nation-state context without outside interference.

Nonetheless, the first question is the more important one. For only where civil liberties are intact can democracy be stable. And only governments that are legitimate in the eyes of their own people can act as dependable partners in the international arena in the long run. And that is why the principle of non-interference has already been dropped, and rightly so, in one respect: from a democratic point of view, it is sensible and unproblematic to let foreigners observe elections and assess their quality.

Eight years ago, the presence of such observers in Florida might have even prevented a major legitimacy crisis in the United States. The unclear and bitterly contested result of the election there certainly did nothing to enhance America’s standing in the world, nor to strengthen belief in the universal principles of democracy in general. All summed up, such doubts obstruct the efforts of those who are making demands for democratic rule in authoritarian-run states in the Arab world and elsewhere.