Naive Europeans hailed the 2010 ‘Arab Spring’ as promising a new era in the Middle East. Yet it seems more likely that those nations – Tunisia, Egypt and Libya – will merely be ruled by new autocrats.
The truth is that democracy is ailing – not least here in Britain. Many people despise and distrust politicians.
They doubt that the energy expended on trekking to a polling station once every five years will benefit them or their societies.
A few years ago, Portuguese Nobel prizewinner Jose Saramago wrote a brilliant allegorical novel about democratic corruption, entitled Seeing. It was set in a nameless modern city during an election campaign, where three-quarters of the voters are so disgusted by their politicians that they returned blank ballots.
The government, bewildered and furious about the mass protest, orders a rerun: this produces 83 per cent of blank papers.
The writer’s point, of course, is that modern politics has become meaningless to most people. It has simply descended into a struggle for power among small and unrepresentative elites, devoid of convictions or integrity, who ignore or defy the views of the people who elect them.
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