In the electoral rounds of Calabria and Tuscany, less than half of those entitled to vote went to vote. Elections are valid, for goodness sake, but participation has always been everything in free countries. Something broke
But can it still be considered a democracy if the absolute majority of the Italian people no longer go to vote? We have before our eyes three electoral rounds in three very different regions, the Marche, Calabria and Tuscany, which rewarded the outgoing regional governments: in the Marche the right won with a right-wing president, in Calabria the center-right won with a center president, in Tuscany the left won, plus the marginal contribution of the 5 stars, with a left-wing president. But in all three regions there is a common thread: the majority of citizens did not go to vote (in the Marche it reached 50 percent). Even in regions famous for high electoral turnout, such as Tuscany.
But can it still be defined as a democracy if the sovereign people with an absolute majority desert the polls? Italy was once one of the countries with the highest rate of political and electoral participation. People voted for three great reasons: out of conviction, out of convenience and to prevent the enemy’s victory. Out of conviction, because the ideal and ideological, as well as political, motivation was strong. For convenience because the clientelistic vote of exchange and the vote of interest were widespread. And then we voted out of fear that our opponent would win.
The country that rarely went to vote, half of its electorate did not go to the polls, was the United States, which was also considered the paradigm of democracy. But the justification was reassuring: there was no fear that the opponent would win because it was thought that democracy was not in danger in any case, there was no risk of escape from the system.
But the reason why people vote less and less in Italy, and in Europe, today is not that, but another: it is the belief that politics, despite the strong opposition between the forces in the field, does not change the fate of a country; there are powers above sovereign governments and the field of political decision-making has become very limited. Furthermore, politics has weak ideal motivations – voting out of conviction – and fails to guarantee advantages to individual voters – voting out of convenience. As a result, people have an increasingly weaker impulse to vote, abstention prevails, withdrawal from contention, distrust in public affairs and in its ability to govern processes and initiate major reforms or slow down declines, falls and structural crises.
Since then the vote has tended to decrease, until it exceeds the warning level of the absolute majority, with the sole hope that this does not happen in major electoral competitions, where – although weaker than in the past – the same reasons still exist, and the strong personalization of politics that we have been witnessing for decades, from Berlusconism onwards, still generates waves of sympathy and antipathy that manage to move citizens a little more. But I return to the initial question: can we consider a democracy an electoral system rejected by the numbers, that is, by the majority of voters who, as a majority, should be sovereign? Isn’t sovereignty also valid in the indication of non-voting, that is, in the rejection of electoral participation?
We can say that European countries, and Italy among them, still remain, despite many contradictions, failures and dark points, regimes of freedom. But democracy is participation.
Let’s be clear, the government of the people is a fictio, a political and legal fiction, because between the vote and the government there is the interpretation of the vote, and then the alliances, the mediations. There is never government by the people. And no force, no leadership alone can obtain an absolute majority of support. Almost all governments are coalitions, which sometimes arise after the outcome of the vote, therefore with a deviation from the electoral programs and the political choices with which they were presented to the voters. Even the populist wave, much opposed by the establishment and the mainstream, collects growing and sometimes majority votes, but they are almost never enough to form governments, except through alliances. And on the other hand, fragile majorities, unstable and often minority leaderships, as happens in many European countries, ultimately fall back on governments with a strong technocratic traction, that is, with exponents who do not come from the vote and democratic mechanisms but are in various ways brought down from above, by strong powers or by international bodies.
But all this in the end confirms the trend mentioned before: democracy is emptying itself, withdrawing, people do not give their consent to governments, at most they accept resignedly, or in the name of some emergency, provisional coalitions and surreptitious leadership of technicians, as was the case of Draghi in our country (not the only one nor the first).
On the other hand, what can be done to reverse the trend or at least to slow down and stem the bleeding of consensus? Yes, of course, restoring high quality and motivation to politics, better selecting its personnel, guaranteeing greater circulation of public elites. But they are recommendations, hopes, good intentions.
We are returning to voting experiences that precede the era of universal suffrage, which was the fulfillment of democracy. Today the remains of politics and the votes in suffrage of the deceased democracy are collected in the polls.
On the other hand, the rest of the world is dominated by autocracies that are more agile in their decisions. We are in a difficult and dangerous point, from which we can expect anything.
