The meaning of "saving democracy"

… and why it’s not about the will of the people

Clearly, 2024 is the year when the citizens of the West must save democracy. It doesn't matter which mainstream media outlet you open these days, and it doesn't matter which Western country you're in. Chances are high that someone will try to convince you that this is the moment to "save our democracy", and that therefore anything is justified to prevent democracy from somehow being destroyed.

People in France, Germany and the USA are being asked to vote for the 'democratic parties'. Democratic party now stands for any-party-that-is-not considered-far-right. Democracy can only be saved if these so-called far-right parties are prevented from gaining power. This justifies extraordinary measures, however undemocratic they may seem to some. Electoral and parliamentary rules that have been in place for many years and have proved their worth are now being changed or reinterpreted in ways that contradict their original spirit, all for the purpose of keeping the new parties out of power. This goal unites all other parties that were political opponents in other circumstances. 

Last July, in order to prevent Le Pen's Rassemblement National (RN) from winning a majority of seats in the French parliament, the other parties worked together before the second round of the elections, strategically choosing in each constituency which candidate would stand alone against the RN candidate and pooling all the non-RN votes that would normally have been distributed among several parties, allowing the RN to most likely win a majority in the French parliament. The strategy worked.

In Germany, the 'democratic' parties are now regularly working together to prevent the populist AfD from being granted certain parliamentary rights that have never been denied to any elected party since the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany. This includes denying the party any committee chairmanship in the Bundestag and changing the parliamentary procedure in the state of Thuringia to deny the AfD, which came first in the last elections, the usual preferential right to propose a candidate for the presidency of the parliament. A proposal is now on the table to amend the German constitution to ensure that the AfD, should it ever come to power, cannot make structural changes to the German Constitutional Court with a simple majority.

In the United States, the upcoming presidential election is clearly being framed by the Democrats as a defining moment that could mark the “end of democracy” if Trump is elected. Over the past two years, Donald Trump has been indicted in several criminal cases, and earlier this year, for the first time, a sitting or former US president was convicted of a crime. Independent observers have no doubt that "the partisan motives of the Democratic prosecutors and judges” were obvious. It was an attempt to weaken Trump's presidential campaign through lawfare, although in this case the strategy appears to have been unsuccessful.

All these measures are extraordinary and arguably set dangerous precedents. But according to the rhetoric, seemingly extraordinary circumstances call for extraordinary remedies.

But what is really so dangerous about our current situation, and what do our political leaders really mean when they say that democracy is in danger and we must save it?

Democracy is often said to mean 'rule by the people'. Our representative democracies are a form of government in which the people elect representatives to make decisions 'on behalf of the people'. This is what the physicist and cultural commentator Eric Weinstein calls Type A democracy. The essence of this definition of democracy is that it is ultimately about the will of the people, as opposed to the rule of a few (oligarchy) or the rule of one (monarchy).