The elections in Greece and Egypt will not determine their fate. Power has shifted to the markets, Brussels and beyond
It used to be so simple. Voting was like driving: turn the wheel left and the car would move left, nudge it right and it would shift right. All that it took to effect a national change in direction was a majority of votes. Everyone understood the idea and we called it democracy.
This weekend sees a profound challenge to that simple notion and it comes in the form of two very different elections – one in Greece, the other in Egypt. For once it is no exaggeration to say the future of both countries hangs in the balance. In Egypt, this was billed as the moment that would entrench last year's revolution, the high watermark of the wider Arab awakening. For Greeks, this is the election that determines whether they belong in or out of the eurozone, perhaps even whether the single currency survives or dies.
Those stakes would be high enough. And yet it is democracy itself that is now being tested. That's most obvious for Egyptians, currently wondering whether there is any point in casting their ballots at all. On Thursday the country's constitutional court – its bench packed with Mubarak-era judges – dissolved the parliament elected six months ago in Egypt's first free elections for more than 60 years. The parliament was dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, but plenty of secular and liberal Egyptians were outraged by the dissolution, all reaching for the same word: "coup".
They branded this a power-grab by Egypt's military rulers who, faced with the prospect of the Brotherhood candidate winning the presidency in this weekend's run-off, are refusing to let go. Democracy in Egypt, which waited so long to be born, may yet be strangled at birth. Those 2011 dreams of a swift democratic transformation, spreading from Tunis to Cairo to Tripoli to Damascus, seem long ago and forlorn.
But let's be hopeful, perhaps naive, and say the Egyptian military brass relents and respects the current elections, even if that means allowing the Muslim Brotherhood to hold both parliament and the presidency. Even that might not be enough. A former Obama administration official told me this week that the "international community" would want to see several clear commitments from a new Islamist government in Cairo: guarantees of women's rights, minority rights and open, contested elections as well as a promise to abide by peace agreements with Israel and so on. All those demands are legitimate in themselves, but the underlying thinking is tricky. It promises to work with an Islamist government just so long as that government tones down the Islamism. It says to the Egyptian people: "You can elect a leopard if you want, just so long as it changes its spots."
The Greece case is much more stark. Voters there seem determined to oppose the current, IMF-imposed rush to austerity, either by slamming on the brakes with a vote for the leftist Syriza, or by easing the pace with the conservative New Democracy party. The question is, will they be allowed to do that? Or will the countries of the eurozone, led by Germany, insist that any softening on austerity automatically ushers the Greeks towards the exit?
The point is, the answer is not in the Greeks' own hands. They are subject to the decisions of others, over whom they have no democratic control. Fair enough, you might say, since the Greeks are demanding the help of others – in the form of cash to bail out their ailing economy. But the effect is the same. For the Greeks, the ancient, animating promise of democracy – that it allows a people to be the master of their own fate – no longer holds.
Instead, the Greeks' future ultimately rests not on any choice they make, but on the preferences of Angela Merkel and a handful of others whom no Greek can vote in or out. Even if they could, it might make no difference. As one senior British politician puts it, if Germany and the European commission were not imposing these demands on Greece, then the bond markets would be doing it directly – "Merkel and Barroso are just the public face".
This shift of sovereignty – from national capitals to Brussels and Berlin, and from governments to markets – is not the worst of it. For the global economic crisis has exposed weakness after weakness in our democratic order.
At its most basic, western democratic governments are now almost inherently unpopular. Severe and too-fast austerity – exacerbated by what Gordon Brown, in a rare intervention on Thursday, rightly calls "Europe's one-dimensional obsession with public debt" – cannot conceal the larger truth, also acknowledged in Brown's op-ed, which is that wealth is steadily shifting from west to east.
Crudely, it means that governments whose prime task used to be giving things to people now have to take things away from them. That makes governments unpopular, a fact borne out by the serial toppling of incumbents in the post-Lehman era, whether in Spain, France, Greece, Italy, Ireland or beyond. But they have a legitimacy problem too. Politicians suddenly look small. The big forces that shape our lives – whether the euro or the bond markets – are increasingly beyond the reach of any national government.
One British frontbencher reckons this helps explain the rising resentment of perks enjoyed by politicians: voters were ready to tolerate such trappings when the politicians appeared to be in charge, but they resent it when those they elect seem so impotent. Perhaps no one would mind David Cameron sharing country suppers with Rebekah Brooks if he were leading the country to economic recovery. But he isn't and, despite the latest desperate move by George Osborne and Mervyn King, it seems as if he can't.
The truth is, the current crisis is supranational, if not global, in nature – yet democracy still works in nation-state-sized units. Our governments resemble those mythical Polish cavalrymen, doomed as they charged on horseback at German tanks, just a lance in their hands. The old tools are too weak for the task.
The obvious answer is collective, global action, with Monday's G20 summit in Mexico the moment to act. But the recent record is not encouraging. The glum reality is that, while Egyptians thirst for a taste of the democracy denied them, those who have enjoyed it much longer are finding it drying in our mouths. Once seen as a universal elixir, democracy is now found wanting, struggling to work its magic.
Twitter: @j_freedland
