When Representative Democracy Got Idealistic

Almost every democracy is “representative”. Let Glyn Moody describe it:

“Yes, elections take place, but after that, politicians just seem to do what they want, with little concern for what the public really thinks about the laws that they push through.”

Except if you are a Swiss citizen. There it’s easy to call for a popular vote:

“If 50,000 signatures are collected from Swiss voters or eight cantons [Swiss states] demand a referendum within 100 days, then a popular vote is held.”

Keeping Switzerland’s size and population in mind, 50,000 is not as trivially small a number as it might be in other countries; but nor is it an impossibly big number to get either.

If you think India needs such a system, join the queue: Germany needs it before us! Why? Because Chancellor Angela Merkel, an otherwise cautious politician who knew the pulse of the voters, has changed. As George Soros said:

“In the case of the (Syrian) migration issue, she did act on principle.”

Now keep in Germany is a country that has been having problem with migrants they want to send back (Algerian, Moroccan, Tunisian) long before Syria; and yet, Merkel decided to roll out the red carpet for the Syrians.

And then came the unbelievable number sexual assaults at Cologne station on New Year’s Eve. Over 650 criminal complaints have been filed based on just that one night. All 13 suspects arrested so far are from the 3 countries listed in the previous paragraph. Surely 13 people could not have assaulted 650 women; as a detective said, there were “a mass of perpetrators”. Good luck catching them when budget cuts have been reducing cop count for years. And it’s not just Muslims. Serbian, Kosovars and Albanian immigrants are over-represented in criminal stats of Germany. The German Interior Minister has warned many times that German police are not at all equipped or prepared to deal with a terror strike like Paris.

The German system isn’t geared for the quantity of Syrian refugees. Thus, they are unable to track refugees via a single system, leaving an opportunity for the same immigrant to register in different states and collect social benefits from all of them! In any case, most immigrants never assimilate and they creates another round of problems later.

Isn’t it ironical that the one time a politician (Merkel) acted based on idealism, it has screwed the country just as much (or more) as their usual political, cynical decisions? I guess there’s the idealism of Lincoln (abolish slavery) and Nehru (voting rights for all citizens); and there’s the brain dead stupid version of idealism Merkel style.