Our Desk | This is not a democracy – Part 1

Renato Marques

This is not a democracy! This was a sentence I have gotten used to hearing since my early days in Macau. I confess that at the time, the sentence sounded very rough to my European ears, as I used to take democracy and democratic political systems for granted.
It did not sound good when someone would tell me “This is not a democracy,” but, soon enough, that message started to sink in and I started to understand that this was not just a way to express some form of authoritarian power, but also, and mostly, a way to make me understand the different values and culture of the place where I was settling in.
Macau is not, and never was, ruled according to a democratic system and rules. Instead, it was always, and continues to be, ruled by an “informal parliamentary system” composed of different circles: some closer to the core and the decision points, while others gravitate in the outer layer of this micro solar system.
Some of these circles, and of course, the people that form them, would like to see Macau become more democratic or, so to speak, have a higher representability of different voices among those that comprise the decision-making, nuclear groups. However, other groups would like the decision makers narrowed down to the hardcore, and to open a wider gap between the decision-makers and the “common people.”
These, and other clashing ideas, are present in any society and virtually in any place on Earth, and while democracy is “not the solution” to pursue, for many it has been difficult to name another system that works better and ultimately makes more people happy or at least not completely unhappy within society.
Of course, the position that a certain person or group of people possess in this spectrum or rather, in which layer of this group of circles you are, you will have a different perception of what is good or bad, and what is “the best for everyone.”
If you ask me, I usually find the best perceptions of what constitutes a society by finding opinions and perceptions from the middle layers. I know this is not a groundbreaking strategy, and to find the “average person” is usually seen as just a mathematic exercise.
Nevertheless, what we see nowadays in many places, Macau included, is a political battle between the opposing sides, as if the outer circles are battling the core ones and vice versa, while a huge majority, those in the middle, are either assisting. Or, if they are located at the edges of the clashing groups, they tend to side with those that they are nearer.
In both cases, what happens is the center groups tend to suffer from both sides as though this political game is just a football match between the core team and the outsiders’ team. In this case, the middle ones are the ball.
While changes in political systems are always pushes-forward from new or different interests, the maintenance for a long period of a very same system (which some call stability) undoubtedly favors the established powers and that is why we call it “the establishment.”
In reality, it is all true what has been said over the decades to put down democratic systems, as democracies are not necessarily peaceful and they are also somehow quite unstable. But it is not this instability that generates their power. The power to change, to improve, to develop, to make it better…
As someone once said, democratically elected governments might be bad governments, but it is far less painful to remove a democratically elected government than one that was not democratically elected.