[FRIAM] Democracy at work

[steve smith]

Pieter -

Congratulations on what sounds like a win from your perspective... we 
sure haven't exhibited much grace lately.   I felt like Gore (2000) and 
Hillary 2016), despite fighting for transparency and fairness backed 
out/down pretty gracefully pretty quickly... absolutely not so in 2020 
and possibly never again?  I think bad habits might be harder to break 
than good ones...

Did I hear correctly that SA was the first (main?) country to ask the 
ICC to treat the Netanyahu gov't as war criminals?  With the new 
President of MX running on that as part of her platform?   Was it the 
outgoing SA government or the incoming (or new coalition?) who holds 
that stance?   Was that stance part of the political calculus that 
pushed the ANC out?

There are many here who are more politically astute than I am so I'm 
asking for feedback on my observations:

 1. Parliamentary Democracies.   A shallow search tells me that there
    are easily a half-dozen variations which are for the most part too
    subtly differentiated for me to know what to think about them. 
    Overall it seems to me that some/many of these systems have been
    able to avoid the political lock-in that comes with some of our own
    "winner take all" systems.   Is this even vaguely accurate, are
    there notable exceptions?
 2. I sometimes hear that Parliamentary Democracies are "better" in that
    they are more able to represent centrist majorities over extremist
    populism as it feels we have been courting/experiencing through
    modern history.   I also sometimes hear that the volatile nature of
    the possibility of on-demand elections and reformulation of
    coalitions yields "too much" change too quickly to settle into good
    governance?
 3. I feel as if our Presidential system and style of separation of
    powers was well intentioned and perhaps worked well up to a point
    but that either evolutionary pressures (over time) have undermined
    that separation or perhaps simply that astute (and
    aggressive/greedy?) individuals have "gamed" it into ???
 4. We have discussed Ranked Choice voting and elimination of
    (obsolute?) institutions like the Electoral College to try to remedy
    this in the US but I'm not sure how quickly we will get a 'round tuit.

I don't know how many non US (active/interested?) members of FriAM we 
have here but I do recognize we have notable engagement from you (SA) 
and Germany (JF) and Australia and India and Ecuador (GS) and NL (JQ/DW) 
and Egypt/Sweden (Mohammed ex-officio?) with first-hand experience under 
various forms of parliamentary gov'ts and the many hear are very well 
traveled and have close colleagues globally who must report/confer on 
these issues from time to time.

I think of SA as being somewhat unique in a number of ways that might be 
salient to the contemporary questions at hand in the world which include 
maybe most notably the waning (or ringing) legacy of the colonialism 
that started during the age of exploration and then took a strange turn 
during modern (golden age of transportation/communication forward?) times?

- Steve

On 6/16/24 8:59 PM, Pieter Steenekamp wrote:
> We recently had a general election here in South Africa, and I am 
> extremely proud to be South African given the current developments. 
> The ANC, which has been in power since the first democratic election 
> in 1994, lost their absolute majority, with their percentage share of 
> the vote decreasing from around 58% to 40%.
>
> What makes me proud is the dignified manner in which they are handling 
> this significant loss. They negotiated an agreement with the 
> second-largest party to form a Government of National Unity and are 
> currently working with various smaller political parties to share 
> power based on a formula that considers the relative share of votes. 
> The extremist left-wing parties are rejecting this and will form the 
> opposition.
>
> While many things could still go wrong, it currently appears that this 
> is how democracy is meant to function.
>
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