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Democracy reborn?

A new American president has been voted in but 2009 will be a significant year for the democratic process elsewhere.

India, the world’s biggest democracy, will hold a general election – five Indian states went to the polls on 14 November – with many issues in the foreground: the impact of the global financial crisis on the Indian economy; terror attacks; communal riots; price rises; and the Indo-US nuclear deal. The most populous Muslim country, Indonesia, will also elect a president in 2009 and there will be a national election in Afghanistan.

In Europe, the Germans will go to the polls next September and the UK Parliamentary election will be called at any time between now and 2010. Indeed, the whole of the 27-country EU, with half a billion people, will hold elections for the European Parliament on 4 June.

Political anthropologists usually get excited by broad patterns that emerge in the voting across the world, but economists will be monitoring more closely whether the fallout from the current financial meltdown benefits parties that favour big government rather than small.

Germans are rekindling their love affair with social democracy while German Chancellor Angela Merkel has proclaimed that financial institutions that take up the government’s €500bn rescue plan must give something back, as she stepped up calls for pay caps.

In the UK, some Labour MPs want Prime Minister Gordon Brown – the lame duckling transformed into widely praised swan for his handling of the economic crisis – to call an election next spring, before the worst of the looming recession kicks in.

Of interest to academics and economists alike is whether voters tend to reject incumbents or tend to stick with the leaders they know in uncertain times. Or might voters punish mainstream parties – those in power and in opposition alike – by flocking to smaller and regional ones, as has been the recent pattern in India, for example.

The third big issue is just how enthusiastic people will be about voting in general. Turnout in the EU’s elections has fallen with each successive five-yearly poll. Barack Obama’s victory, widely held to have galvanised democracy in the US, could transform that – except for the fact that the EU President remains an unelected leader while MEPs have no executive power other than to propose legislation to the EU Commission. The Lisbon Treaty, which would have given more power to Brussels, was torpedoed by the Irish in a referendum in June, a result engineered partly by entrepreneur Declan Ganley who spent several hundred thousand euros campaigning via his organisation Libertas.

Libertas, says Ganley, will become the first pan-European political party, with offices in several cities; Ganley will “select” political allies, not necessarily from the mainstream, but talented ones, able to attract part of the “lost” electorate. The Libertas leader says he will turn the election into a heated debate about the Lisbon treaty and that he plans to win 20–30 seats in the assembly.

“That’s why they’re so nervous in Brussels. Such a party would greatly enliven the European debate. What’s more, it’d inject more democracy into it. Today, no one debates about Europe in the European elections,” says Ganley.