Ballot box or Armalite but certainly not both

2/8/2006 -

WHEN is democracy not democracy? Answer: when it yields a result that you don’t like. When that happens, the temptation is to do two things - one worse than the other. The first thing is to change the rules for elections so that it becomes harder for the party you don’t like to win.

Fianna Fáil tried that when they wanted to scrap the proportional representation system, but the Irish people refused to go along with that. And dead right too.

The second strategy when an election outcome pisses you off involves something much more serious. You simply deny the legitimacy of the outcome. You don’t deny that it happened, but you refuse to do business with people or the party concerned.

This, in effect, means withholding recognition of their mandate. Implicit in this is the view that these people or their party is unworthy or illegitimate or otherwise undeserving of support, even though that support from the public is now part of the public record.

To say that we are opening up a can of worms if we go down this road is something of an understatement. This is highly dangerous stuff with legal (potentially) consequences for democracy.

You can’t, on the one hand, declare that all power derives from the people and then, on the other hand, refuse to recognise the outcome when the people have exercised the very power that you have acknowledged is exclusively theirs to exercise.

To put it another way, the concept of consent is an essential component of the exercise of democracy. When we play the democratic game we consent to abide by the rules; above all, we consent to accept and honour the outcome. Without this element of consent, democracy would simply fall apart. The whole thing would be a mean-ingless charade.

The most cogent reason - it is said - for withholding consent is when the people who have won an electoral victory are regarded as “ terrorists”. When this happens the cry then goes up: “we’ll never do business with terrorists”.

We’re hearing this at present from various quarters following the stunning success of HAMAS, the militant Islamic group, in the elections for the Palestinian Parliament. HAMAS won 74 of the 132 seats in the Parliament, compared with only 45 for the once all-powerful FATAH, the party of the late Yasser Arafat.

This scenario is not exactly new to us in Ireland. The growing electoral support for Sinn Fein has put quite a few noses out of joint. If this continues at the next general election, it will create quite a quandary for the other political parties. What will they do if the involvement of Sinn Fein is crucial for the creation of a viable coalition government?

The crossover factor is the problem here, as it is for HAMAS in the Middle East. By “crossover” I mean that you have people who were prominent in Sinn Fein and the IRA and vice versa. Danny Morrison’s infamous comment about the ballot box in one hand and the Armalite in the other encapsulates the problem.

What to do? Well, where there is an election mandate it has to be honoured, but that means by both sides. If you play the democratic game, you consent to abide by the rules. And one of the most fundamental of these is that violence and terror are incompatible with democratic processes.

What it comes down to is this --it is either the ballot box or the Armalite. You can’t play the democratic game while maintaining a private army. This applies whether you are in Palestine or in Ireland. It goes for HAMAS as much as for Sinn Fein.