Western pundits are fond of calling President Putin an autocrat and denigrating Russia as not a democracy. However their crocodile tears would be better shed at home, where lack of democratic legitimacy is at least as bad, if not worse.
In the 2024 election in the UK, Labour secured a huge majority of seats and 100% control of government, with only 33.7% of the vote (and less actual votes than in 2019). More votes were cast for Reform (14.3%) than Liberal Democrat (12.2%), yet the Lib Dems got 72 seats while Reform got only 5. The Green Party also got less than 1% of the MPs despite receiving 6.4% of the votes.
Neil Kinnock in 1992 (34.4%) and Jeremy Corbyn in 2017 (40%) both got a larger vote share than Kier Starmer in 2024, yet ended up out of power. Two thirds of voters voted against Labour in 2024, but are currently powerless at the national level.
It’s even worse in Canada, where at the last election in 2021, the Conservatives got more votes than the Liberals, yet ended up with 39 less seats and out of power. The same thing happened in 2019 as well. Liberal leader Trudeau has ruled Canada for the past four years based on winning only 32.6% of the election vote.
The electoral system is different in the USA, where the political leverage is spread between Congress, the Senate, and the Presidency. Yet, the two major parties fix the electoral rules to maintain their duopoly and use the legal system to block third party candidates (such as RFK Jr in 2024).
A pretence is made that our western political leaders bow to the will of the electorate, but in practice, the leaders of the major parties consistently collude to ensure that their grip on power remains unthreatened.
A case could be made for the First Past the Post (FPTP) system in use in the UK and Canada, in that it leads to strong government and avoids the regular turmoil seen in places like Italy which use a Proportional Representation (PR) system. In earlier times, where there were less parties, that might have had some cogency.
However, in these times where there are Green and populist parties everywhere challenging the moribund incumbents, and representing over a third of the electorate, the cynical resistance to Proportional Representation tarnishes the democratic legitimacy of the incumbents.
When Labour’s Keir Starmer remains opposed to PR, he is saying to the people of the UK that he cares more about staying in power than he cares about democratic representation. Little surprise then that Labour actually lost votes between 2019 and 2024, and voter turnout overall was down 7.5%. Why vote if the system is fixed to exclude the party which best represents your views?
Even if one accepts the “strong government” theory around FPTP, it still mangles parliamentary representation of smaller parties. Regional parties (UK: Plaid Cymru, SNP, and 2024 LibDem; Canada: Bloc Québécois) whose vote is geographically concentrated escape the FPTP repression, but mid-size parties with geographically widespread support (Reform, Green) get crushed.
Most European countries already have PR systems, and their governments are usually alliances of parties, which agree on programmes tolerable to each member of the alliance. The vote of every elector counts, in that more MPs for your party gives your party leader better leverage in the horse-trading of alliance formation.
Yet the establishment parties in Europe are playing a dangerous game when they seek to exclude the populist parties from the democratic process, such as with Georgescu in Romania in 2025, and the ongoing attempts to ban AfD in Germany and Marine Le Pen in France. Excluding those with whom you disagree from the democratic process forces the populists down less democratic avenues, which benefits no one. A european country trying to ban a party with over 20% electoral support looks not so dissimilar to the cynical resistance to PR in the UK and Canada.
Looking further east, Zelensky’s government in Ukraine has banned opposition parties, dissolved independent media, and will not submit itself to an election until after the war ends, yet we are expected to support it as somehow “defending democracy”. Polls indicate Zelensky’s support in a future election might be as low as 20%, so he is hardly motivated to end the war, as it will terminate his power, and make him vulnerable to corruption prosecution or even more lethal retribution for the money and lives lost during the war.
Political parties in Ukraine are little more than the ideology-free personal vehicles of power-brokers (Poroshenko, Tymoshenko) or front-men (Zelensky). Much like Russia really. But at least Putin still enjoys majority support in Russia, and held an election on time in 2024. While the 2024 election numbers may have suffered from ballot irregularities, Putin’s domestic support has not dropped below 60% since he came to power 25 years ago.