And there is a ritual here, not just counting votes

While meeting a few days ago with two or three political analysts from Western Europe, one of their questions was why in Romania elections seem to solve nothing... The question struck me as interesting because, if we look at many European countries these days, elections seem to solve very little anywhere. However, we see, in terms of public preference, a wave of discontent that redefines political opinions and somehow distances them from classic preferences, those based on mainstream ideologies and rather elitist parties. The special touch within the EU is the renegotiation of the contract with the Union. The most pessimistic see here a departure from the way people used to accept that democracy works. Moreover, there is a whole madness in the specialized literature regarding the definition of the terms populism, sovereignism, radicalism, and the degree of overlap among them.

If we are going through a phase of redefining democracy and electoral systems in the Western world or just through a wave of discontent longer than sociologists expected remains to be seen. New means of communication have certainly left their mark on political marketing and on public participation in debate, but everything cannot be reduced to that. The lack of trust in institutions and the mechanisms of democracy is chronic in the Western world and is almost the only constant in decades that have involved quite mobile administrative, ideological, and geopolitical arrangements.

In fact, the public is asked for their vote too often, too many promises are made, and naturally, changes in reality, especially positive ones, cannot keep pace with promises and expectations. In a way, the creators and managers of democracies started from the idea that man is naturally democratic and societies either ignored or forgot to teach the simple man to be democratic as an attitude and vision of everyday life. Gradually, democracy has been confused with electoral marketing. Other segments of the public have disengaged (the issue of absenteeism) to the point where they had no interest in politics, only to re-engage politically furiously, only in times of crisis.

There is also a whole literature on voting theory as rational or emotional choice – so much has been discussed that this separation seems relatively simplistic today. Let us remember how, at one point, even President Iohannis, who communicates publicly quite rarely, gave a lesson in electoral analysis in which he explained to center-right politicians that elections are won through emotion. A slightly amusing intervention, especially since emotion was not exactly the former president's specialty, although we could say that he had benefited electorally from the public's emotions.

After all, elections are also a ritual, in the anthropological sense of the term. Beyond doctrines, policies, stars, advertisements, and electoral clips, beyond electoral rules as a political-legal normative system, we must understand that we do not hold elections just to count votes. At the end of the day, more precisely in the evening when everyone watches TV for the spectacle of polls, good or bad, more than for major matches, the nation packs itself after the symbolic war between electoral camps and in the morning starts over with some leaders whom everyone will curse until the end of the next electoral cycle. Somehow, this story is missing from us.