Democracy: Minority, Majority, and in between

Democracy: Minority, Majority, and in between

escrito por Dini Harmita

Abstract 

As many other concepts, every one of us also have our own rights to define participation. In democracy we are actually encouraged to organically facilitate people to find by themselves their needs, priorities, purposes, and ways to find their dreams; and respect the different perspectives. This essay is one of efforts to reflect on learning lessons of democracy from the minorities, majorities, and those who are in between. 

Keywords: Democracy, majority, minority, Europe, Asia, perspective 

Introduction 

Levitski and Ziblatt (2023) started the discussion on the tyranny of democracy with French politics by also analyzing fears of authoritarians including Putin’s behavior. He gathered oligarchs to threaten them not to support politics, particularly democracy. In the face of many challenges from micro to macro, democracy is directly and indirectly expected to cover both minority and majority. This essay is aimed at answering how.

Moshelova (2021) analyzed Bulgarian politics as in between minority and majority emphasis. Haughton, Malova, and Deegan-Krause (2023) called Slovakia as unstable politics yet ready to go as always, following the current Fico’s winning. Like Meloni in Italy with rich people behind her and as mentioned by Levitski and Ziblatt (2023), oligarchs are among the dependent variables influencing the democracy including in Bulgaria and Slovakia. 

Bulgarian politics actually moves as fast as British politics. It may not be because of Tories but as similar to businessmen such Veselin. Usually political parties compete, collaborate, cooperate, coalite, cartelite, and do cordon sanitaire prior elections but both Bulgarian and British politics do those non-peculiar things every day every second. Romania and Moldova have similar phases but not timely (Șaran 2019, Gorbatiuc 2020). 

Italian politics might be sounded moving around Rome where culture, religion, and food are there but it’s not only that. If we follow the logic where Bulgarian and British politics move relatively fast because of economic development represented by money, Italian politics should move even faster. It supports the hypothesis saying that economic development has a very less influence in democracy indeed.

Nonetheless we couldn’t actually only use GNH of Bhutan to replace GDP and employment indeed. Gross National Happiness. As other indexes including GDP and happiness it also has its own indicators and so far only Bhutan is using it. It may sound perfect but it has its own challenges too such as in facing journalists and non native people related to discrimination issues. 

It’s true that we tend to be respected when we could earn, use and manage our money well but do any of us respect any terrorism even when they’re very rich? Because material belongings are temporary thus not only the subject representing the development is also not perennial but also the indicators themselves. 

Democracy from Erdoganism to Thatcherism

Arslantas and Arslantas (2020) analyzed party system change in Turkey with theories from many scholars including one by Mair (1997). We couldn’t really compare Turkey with its surrounding because not only its size is incomparable but also it connects countries around it instead. Its democracy may have been filled with fragmentation, volatility, and polarization, but it doesn’t only happen in Turkey. 

Erdoganisme on the other hand becomes the characteristic that distinguishes its democracy, populism, and authoritarianism with other countries because like Margaret Thatcher of England there may have been many Erdogans in Turkey but there’s only one Erdogan in Turkey who could make his revolutionary people escape the countries because of his leadership. Thus party system change in Turkey runs from Erdoganisme to Erdoganisme, and so does the democracy. It’s actually interesting to know that people run away from countries surrounding Turkey through or to Turkey while the critical people of Turkey themselves tried to flee the country. Indeed it doesn’t happen only in Turkey, for example it also happens in Indonesia but there’s no Erdogan in Indonesia. 

Javzandolgor et al (2022) interestingly as few other scholars of Mongolian democracy study called Mongolia as a buffer country. In a forest, a buffer zone has a function as a useful cleavage; like when we fall, sometimes our feet need a buffer to walk. In Mongolian context it’s intended as a contemporary transition after getting their independence from China. It’s even more interesting to know that Mongolia, Taiwan, Vietnam and Hong Kong learned a lot from China in building their democracy; like post Soviet countries who learned a lot from Russia. Mongolia even put a yin yang symbol in their flag. Perhaps because China is not feeling as threatened as Russia or their One Belt One Road becomes one of their ways to softly be still in touch with related countries, they don’t invade any countries as hard as Russia. 

Georgia supposedly is analysed along with Armenia and Azerbaijan discussed by Kiyak (2019). Freedom House has a 1-7 score of democracy with 1 being the highest score. Interestingly, from 1999 till 2018 Armenia has a highest point in civil society. It was 3.50 from 1999 till mid of 2007 and 3.75 from mid of 2007 till 2018. While the electoral system and corruption equally have the worst points with average 5.75. 

Sharing a political culture as Caucasian countries as Armenia and Azerbaijan, as almost all countries in the rest of the world, Georgia is also characterized with corruption. Despite many reasons why scholars tend to analyze it with Moldova, we want to emphasize the very current possible logical reason that Georgia lies below Russia and Moldova under Ukraine. From 2009 to 2018, Georgia has the highest point of 6.0 in national governance as part of democracy score from Freedom House and it was in 2009, while Moldova has the same highest point for corruption in 2009 and 2018 including several years prior. 

The reason was the same as other typical reasons: 2008 economic recession. The crisis has caused similar conflicts in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Moldova: ethnicity conflicts. What gaps caused the conflict? If it’s not only for ideological polarization, is it also because certain ethnicities are richer so they are not influenced by the crisis when others were suffering? Like Erdoganism and Thatcherism, Georgia even had Georgianism. 

Spain

Spain has the privilege of having a free democracy in voicing up literally everything, you name it; LGBTQ checked, desigualdad checked, participatory, deliberate, participatory to militant democracy checked, fights in legislative, executive, and judiciary agencies checked. To ban freedom of speech in democracy is like to forbid us writing or listening to music, in which for most of us it’s a basic right and need. Like Van Gogh, painting and drawing were actually his fundamental right. Nonetheless, Spanish constituency about freedom should actually be also adjusted with the 1978 article saying that any kind of education should be done in efforts to develop democracy and with its values. 

When the right wings deliver their speech, it’s actually predictable what they’re going to say; and so do the left and middle wings. When the audiences are already in front of the stage, there are two possibilities: either they’re paid or told by their bosses to be there, or it’s their own willingness to be there. Depending on what you are, what’s your purpose in life, what you actually want to achieve by attending it, you will take note in your brain first what you want to listen to. If you need to attack or defend, you will use the information. 

De facto, why we are suggested to be useful for others; it’s because our new edition of MacBook, iPhone, iPad, and iWatch are actually not only for us. We open our MacBook every second to know how our loved one is. We open our iPhones everyday to stop the alarms because we need to work. We open our iPads everyday to read and summarize so we could give at least different perspectives to our readers. 

No matter what we sell, in the case of Spain, does CGPJ care about small farmers who need to walk barefoot? Do they care about the percebes experts surviving their life and could meet their families or not? Will they punish the doctors who give a deep fake evidence on diagnosis simply because they’re paid to do so? 

Spain as we know is a space intellectuals should dream of to study democracy. It represents diversity. Ideology polarization in Spain occurred mainly because of the facilitation of ideas where everyone could fight for what people believe as democracy. PSOE and Sumar decided that to have a coalition is indeed better than to choose far right or radical right wings to govern. Nonetheless, since it’s still avoiding disaster instead of making progress, acknowledging that both leading persons of the parties are economists, we may need to be a little careful not to repeat the same mistakes. At least the members should comprise of representation from many backgrounds including populism and authoritarianism, not only by professions such as political scientists, sociologists, mathematicians, or practitioners. That’s when we all could enjoy the beauty of listening and debating based upon logical reasoning I mentioned before; so we could learn from each other.

Democracy from Finland to Denmark 

Crimea Bridge was actually built by Russia and they attacked it afterwards instead. They could actually use the money for or empowering people with water scarcity in Puerto Rico or southern part of Africa.

Following the logic of being in the south tends to be less developed, the southern part of Africa perhaps shares the same reasons to flee their countries. That’s why immigrants from their countries keep coming, including to Poland. Tragically, those who used to be a minority built their own empire afterwards and created a tyranny directly or indirectly. 

Fukuyama (2013) mentioned reform as the main part of institutionalization. In the contexts of Estonian politics, few researchers perceived democracy as sacred as ethnically and ethically routinisation processes while Like Spain, Finland and especially Denmark have tighter relations with monarchy in Europe. It’s actually surprising to have a country still being dictated in 1976, nevertheless it didn’t only happen in Spain. It happened in several other countries.

Borrowing the characteristics of authoritarianism of Case (2021), be it authoritarianism or populism, when the military is involved everything ‘bad’ tends to be vigorously repeated. Political parties may often only use pens or words to fight, nonetheless not few of them are backed up by the militaries. Most militaries are formed by the governments and most oligarchs need the government permits for their businesses. In the Indonesian case, it was also to avoid disasters indeed when the voters chose Jokowi. Who doesn’t like a hard working president? Nonetheless, when he decided to agree upon laws that are in favor of oligarchs, of course people are disappointed. 

Some may call it disinformation, misinformation, or propaganda but all of them are actually the same, it’s attacking our brain vigorously. It creates its own fake reality in favor of them. So shameful indeed to know some people are even using it for collecting money. When oligarchs come into the picture, it becomes worse. 

When a leader is an authoritarian or a populist, it doesn’t mean the people are also authoritarian or populist indeed, but the routinisation process explained how most of the time both represent each other. When they eat guns, what will they produce? When they use too many pens, what will happen? When they say something bad too much, what will happen? It creates a system at some point. Not to mention, the poor still starve, trying to survive daily by collecting garbage and asking neighbors sincerely if they have rice for the families, sitting, dancing, becoming clowns, playing guitar and violin on the street. 

Conclusion 

From aforementioned explanations I hope whatever you catch or save in your memories as readers you could already notice and classify which ones are minorities, majorities, and in between by now. Because only by that you could assess yourself that even when minorities are too much in democracy it’s not preferred thus it’s called as a tyranny.