Election Day!

I wasn't feeling too great, but still I was determined not to miss this opportunity. It was September 12, Election Day. and for the fifteenth time I was about to make use of my right to vote.

It took me less than two minutes to carry out what I consider to be my duty as a citizen as I already had decided which party was going to get my vote. I'm definitely a party faithful, and I tend to stick to my political convictions from one election to the other. But I have, slightly depressingly, come to realize lately that I now belong to a race of people whose presence at the polling station is diminishing ominously.

Every two years elections are held in this country, and for as long as I can remember, the percentage of voters who turn up to cast their ballot into the ballot boxes, has almost imperceptibly been going down. As voter's expectations reach new levels - and politicians clamour to outbid one another in terms of election promises - more and more people choose to refrain from participating in our democratic processes, and instead join the sullen ranks of 'the couch potatoe' voters.

SCARING? YES!

Frankly, it scares me ever so slightly. Why? Because if the present trend continues unchecked and unheeded, our democracy risks in the near future becoming the playground of the few. If people give up on voting, assuming falsely their votes no longer matter, we may become dramatically more vulnerable to the demagoguery of right or left-wing movements that, as in the past, spurn universal suffrage - believing instead in the right of an elite to exercise exclusive power - purportedly for the 'common good'.

Ironically, it was the immature democracy of post-WW1 Germany that brought Hitler to power in 1933. Still I believe that the human invention brought to us by the ancient greeks of Athens, is by far superior to the old order of political clout based on ancestry, old money or perceived superiority (having studied at the right universities or schools)

FAR BETTER THAN TYRANNY

Despite its flaws and shortcomings, democracy has quite a number of redeeming qualities. The finest among them is that it provides a bulwark against tyrannical abuse of avowed, basic human rights: every two years our politicians are basically forced to listen to the voice of the public. Both the plumber and the lawyer, both the affluent and the (relative) pauper, have a say as to what issues in society need to be addressed.

And if they don't deliver, or if they are assessed as having strayed too far from their professed course of action, voters are by law empowered to penalize them by shifting their allegiance from one party to the other. Thus, politicians are forbidden from holding on to power endlessly. They are barred from the possibility of personal aggrandizement or unjust gain. Our electoral system, derived from our democratic heritage, guarantees that power is shared, albeit for a little while.

And in a little less than two minutes my co-voters and I see to it that the power-hungry are kept tightly onto their leashes of accountability. Remember, the ballot seems to say to the politician, that in a few years it's time for a reality check once again.