Transformation versus Stagnation:
A reading on the symbolism beyond recent
elections at the Post-Soviet Space
AUTHOR
TIAGO FERREIRA LOPES
NOVEMBER 2012
In the last two years Albania, Belarus, Georgia, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia,
Lithuania, Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Russia, Serbia, Turkmenistan and Ukraine
underwent parliamentary or presidential elections in what could have been perceived as a
democratic spark through the post-soviet space. But are elections a meaningful
mechanism to assert about the democratization of those sociopolitical sovereign spaces?
Democracy: A Political System or a Procedure?
The conceptualization of Democracy is one of the biggest challenges to political scientists
across the globe. A horde of intellectuals, academicians and researchers has devoted
their lives to reach a more consensual concept of democracy, following the guidance of
Karl Popper (1965, p. 115) according to whom “our discoveries are conjectural” and only
truthful if successfully submitted to continuous falsifications tests.
The most popular conception of democracy used by political actors is the “minimalist,
procedural one rooted in the notion, originally put forward by Joseph Schumpeter, that
democracy is a method or process of selecting rulers” (Bova, 2001, p. 64), in this
perspective a political system that has elections can be labeled as democracy. With this
conception of democracy (transformed in a simple procedure) regimes like the ones in
Albania, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan can easily be considered
democratic.
Elections are quintessential to democratic regimes, but being quintessential does not
mean that elections are a synonym of democracy. Political actors and political scientists
need to move on from this procedural (and limited!) view of electoralism as democracy to
reach a more meaningful conceptualization of democracy as a system. The question
however remains: what is the meaningfulness of Elections has a path to identify
Democratic regimes? In order to answer that, we have to understand the role of elections
inside democratic regimes.
Elections are the most regular “validation” mechanism of democratic regimes, or to make
it simpler, elections give legitimacy to democratic regimes; legitimacy not substance. It is
crucial to acknowledge that “the fundamental idea of democracy legitimacy is that the
authorization to exercise power must arise from collective decisions of the members of a
society” (Cohen, 1997, p. 408) through standardized mechanisms like elections.
Although elections are by far the most inclusive, fair, and balanced mechanism to
legitimize democratic systems they still carry some limitations that must not be ignored.
Knowing that “however central to democracy, elections occur intermittently and only allow
citizens to choose between the highly aggregated alternatives offered by political parties”
(Schmitter, Karl, 1991, p. 115) truthfully democratic regimes tend to fashion alternative
channels that allow other types of representation and consultation of civil society actors.
It is important to do a short detour to clarify what we understand as civil society. In our
perspective “civil society may be defined as a society in which there are autonomous
groups which aggregate the views and activities of individuals and which act to promote
and defend the interests of those people, including against the state” (Gill, 2000, p. 5).
Civil societies need to be acknowledged by political societies (or arenas) in order to be
truthful meaningful, but they also have to acknowledge the legitimacy of those same
political actors. Political and civil societies’ are co-dependent on need each other to exist.
After a small detour to clarify our understanding of civil society, let us get back to our main
argument. The insufficiency of elections as a mechanism to legitimize democratic regimes
is hardly a surprise to those experts, academicians and politicians who concede that
“democracy is [not only] the most widely admired type of political system but also perhaps
the most difficult to maintain” (Diamond, 1990, p. 48).
Democratic regimes have not only to ensure the existence of mechanisms that legitimize
the concession of political power and temporary authority but also they need to ensure
that some obligations are fulfilled and some rights are guaranteed. Democracy is not a
synonym of electoralism but it is a path to guarantee a real, just and fair citizenship inside
sovereign sociopolitical spaces.
A clarifying notion of this relation between democracy and citizenship is the one presented
by Guillermo O’Donnell and Philippe Schmitter (1986, p. 7): “Democracy’s guiding
principle is that of citizenship. This involves both the right to be treated by fellow human
beings as equal with respect to the making of collective choices and the obligations of
those implementing such choices to be equally accountable and accessible to all
members of the polity”.
Another remarkable notion of democracy is the one presented by Juan Linz and Alfred
Stepan in which the authors crisscross three dimensions in order to enlarge the notion of
democracy giving it substance beyond its legitimizing mechanism: elections. In their words
“democratic consolidation requires much more than elections and markets” (Linz, Stepan,
1996, p. 7). A consolidated democracy requires a society in which actors are behaviorally
oriented to democracy; it requires a society that believes in the merits of democratic
institutions and procedures; and it requires the rule of law as the only path to solve any
sort of conflicts.
Elections in the post-soviet space: a diverse realm!
With an enlarged conception of Democracy, that goes beyond its legitimizing mechanism
(elections) we can analyze the democratizing effect of elections throughout the post-soviet
space in the last two-three years. It is important to begin this analysis by asserting that
“contrary to the widely held hopes and expectations at that time, liberal democracy has
emerged and taken root only in a small number of post-communist countries” (Ekiert,
Kubik, Vachudova, 2007, p. 7).
We can divide the countries of the post-soviet space in three categories: democratic frontrunners; semi-democratic or hybrid regimes; democratic illusions. Democratic frontrunners could also be known as euro-democracies since they are the post-soviet states
that entered to the European Union in the last enlargements. Paul Blokker (2005, p. 516)
help us understand this correlation when he argues that “enlargement has (…) exposed
these countries to a more or less imposed adoption of norms and rules of a European
model” in which meaningful democracy is (allegedly) a cornerstone. Being accepted to the
transnational community that is the European Union is generally perceived as evidence
that democracy is already in a consolidation phase, like in Lithuania and Czech Republic,
but we have to consider two exceptions: Latvia and Hungary.
Latvia parliamentary elections hold on the 17th of September 2011 had given the victory to
the center-left Harmony Center with 31 mandates at the Saeima (Latvian Parliament). In
second and third place the Reform Party and Unity, both center-right parties, obtained 42
mandates (aggregated result: 22 mandates to Reform Party and 20 mandates to Unity).
The balance of voting between right and left expresses the current political moment
across the European Union in which uncertainty and right-left balance are the key
markers. The right-left balance that obliges governments to build compromises with the
opposition is actually a feature of democratic regimes in which the establishment of
compromises should be perceived as something natural.
The fact that those parliamentary elections happened after a referendum (23rd of July
2011) on the dissolution of the Latvian parliament is not enough to argue that Latvia is not
a democratic front-runner. We must however to take also into account the impact of the
referendum on the establishment of Russian as a national language in Latvia.
The “final results of the February 18 referendum show that 74.8 percent of voters rejected
the proposed constitutional amendments” (The Lithuania Tribune, 2012) in what was
perceive as a Latvian nationalist defense “against” re-empowering the Russians. The fact
however remains, that Latvia denies some social, cultural and educational rights to theirs
Russian communities.
In Latvia, Russian (or to be ethnically more precise Russkyi) citizens are unable to fulfill
their citizenship entirely. This does not mean that Latvia is a non-democratic state it is
rather a different kind of democratic system. One of the best definitions to understand this
sort of democratic regimes is the one proposed by Sammy Smooha of Ethnic Democracy.
According to this expert an “ethnic democracy is a democratic political system that
combines the extension of civil and political rights to permanent residents who wish to be
citizens with the bestowal of a favored status on the majority group” (Smooha, 2001, p.
23). In Latvia, Russians (or Russkyi) can be citizens as long as theirs Russianness does
not interfere with theirs (the majority group) Latvianness.
Hungary, on their side, held parliamentary elections in April 2010 (won by Fidesz, centerright party) and indirect presidential elections in May 2012; both of those public
consultancies happened under democratic normality. The reason why we see Hungary
not inside the democratic front-runners group falls on Viktor Orban’s (Hungary PrimeMinister) recently approved Constitution and in the dangers that it poses to democratic
consolidation in Hungary.
We cannot disregard that the “critics of the new constitution – who include the
European Commission – say it undermines democracy by undermining the
independence of the central bank and the judiciary” (Radio Free Europe / Radio
Liberty, 2012), by centralizing powers and by ending or diminishing some mechanisms
that ensure the accountability of elected officials. Constitutional experimentalism that
results on a centralization of powers and a subsequent decrease of democratic
pluralism is not new on the post-soviet space, but we cannot have two standards to
similar practices. And so Hungary is out of the democratic front-runners group.
The second group, semi-democratic or hybrid regimes, in which Latvia and Hungary
are positioned encompasses also Albania, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Macedonia, Moldova,
Montenegro, Russia, Serbia and Ukraine. In the years that followed the collapse of the
Soviet Union a democratic euphoria wave swept the transition studies and a lot of
authors focused on defining new types of democracy that would emerge after the
completion of the transitions in the post-soviet space.
Reality proved to be a little more diverse then initially predicted and as “democratization
has continued and attention has focused on an increasingly diverse set of cases, the
proliferation of subtypes and other conceptual innovations has continued” (Collier,
Levitsky, 1997, p. 431) resulting in a multitude of conceptualizations of diminished
subtypes of democracy or, as we called it, semi-democracy.
Those semi-democratic or hybrid regimes belong to two realms, without existing in any of
them. According to Leonardo Molino (2009, p. 277) “they no longer configure some form
of non-democracy and do not yet configure a complete democracy, such institutions still
bear traces of the previous political reality” in a intricate balance that can result in further
democratization or in a setback to the previous authoritarian phase.
The semi-democratic or hybrid regimes group being the most numerous is easily
understood if divided in three subareas: the first subarea comprises the prone-todemocracy-regimes, like the ones in Hungary and Latvia, in which only some last
constitutional, legal and institutional barriers prevent a complete consolidation of the
democratization process.
The second sub-area comprises the mutational-regimes. Kyrgyzstan, Ukraine, Georgia
and Montenegro fall under this category. Elections are used as a device to confirm
mutations at the institutional-constitutional level yet “they suffer from serious democratic
deficits, often including poor representation of citizens. interests, low levels of political
participation beyond voting, frequent abuse of the law by government officials, elections of
uncertain legitimacy, very low levels of public confidence in state institutions, and
persistently poor institutional performance by the state” (Carothers, 2002, pp. 9 – 10).
Elections in Kyrgyzstan confirmed the new political momentum started with the coup of
April 2010. Almazbek Atambayev won the scrutiny with almost 65% of the votes. The new
Constitution diminishes the powers of the President, elected for a single non-renewable
six years mandate, transferring them to the Parliament but the newly elected President of
Kyrgyzstan “has hinted the constitution may be amended but offered no specific details”
(The Guardian, 2011).
In Ukraine presidential elections of February 2010 were used to initiate a new mutational
cycle, finishing with the failed Orange Revolution. The complete volte-face in Ukraine
politics it is astonishing given that “in the 2004 Orange Revolution Viktor Yanukovich was
the operatic villain. (…) But in the latest act, on February 7th he became the
democratically elected president, winning 49% of the vote, against 45.5% for the defeated
prime minister, Yulia Tymoshenko” (Economist, 2010). Elections were a confirmation that
a mutational stage was finished and a new one (apparently more Blue!) is now on place.
In Georgia recent parliamentary elections symbolized the end of the Rose Revolution but
at the same time signaled some successes of President Saakashvili, the hero of the Rose
Revolution, in democratizing Georgia. The success-failure of Saakashvili Georgian Unity
is demonstrated in the tottering reaction of the winner Georgian Dream leader.
“In a bit of political backbiting, Ivanishvili did call on Saakashvili to resign and call an early
presidential election. But earlier, Ivanishvili appeared willing to pause and acknowledge
his rival’s role in getting him there” (State Building and Fragility Monitor, 2012). Georgia is
now entering in a new mutational stage of its political life, but no profound changes, that
could boost and speed up democratizing processes, are expected.
Montenegro’s October 2012 parliamentary election in which “of 514,000 eligible voters,
over 160,000 backed Djukanovic's European Montenegro coalition, gathered around the
ruling Democratic Party of Socialists, DPS” (Balkan Insight, 2012) were used as a mean to
highlight the democratizing efforts of this state since its independence in 2006. The new
goal of Montenegrin officials is to achieve membership at the European Union.
The third subarea of semi-democratic or hybrid regimes can be labeled as semidemocratic-autocracies. In this subarea “elites deploy such institutional elements of
democracy as political parties, elections, and diverse media for the sole purpose of
helping those in power to stay in power. Elections are held regularly, but they do not
provide an opportunity to transfer power, only to legitimize it” (Krastev, 2006, p. 53).
Albania, Macedonia, Moldova, Kazakhstan, Serbia and Russia fall under this third
subarea. On Albania the most recent presidential elections “drew criticism from the EU
and other watchdogs, as opposition lawmakers from SP [Socialist Party] refused to cast
ballots for the vote which paved the path for a unilateral win for Nishani” (Tesfa-Yohannes,
Center for Strategic Studies, 2012) previously Minister of the Interior.
Elections in Albania were used as a rubber stamp and not as a participative, inclusive and
competitive legitimizing mechanism. The rubber stamp feature of elections in semidemocratic-autocracies was also seen on Macedonia in which June 2011 “general
election was won by Nikola Gruevski, the prime minister, and his awkwardly
named Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation – Democratic Party for
Macedonian National Unity (VMRO-DPMNE) party” (Economist, 2011).
In Moldova elections worked as a sign of change and as a symptom of political fragility.
After more than 900 days of stalemate, in March 2012 “Nicolae Timofti, has been elected
president of Moldova” (BBC News, 2012) through parliamentary vote. Timofti promised
changes and a newest path that will end in the integration of the country at the European
Union, but a lot is still to be done. In the last three years Moldova has had parliamentary
elections in 2009, 2010 and 2011, three acting presidents and cumulatively nepotism and
corruption are still “the main game in town”.
Both elections in Albania, Macedonia and Moldova were described as regular by
International Observers but on both cases there were recommendations to deepen efforts
to ensure transparency and to increase civil societies’ confidence in elections as power
legitimizing mechanisms.
Elections in semi-democratic-autocracies can also be used to simulate democratizing
efforts through fictional competitions that although not rigged are unfair and unequal.
Russia and Serbia fall under this type of regimes. In the end of May 2012 “nationalist
candidate Tomislav Nikolic won the Serbian presidency on Sunday, a result that adds to
the political turmoil in the Balkan country and could slow down its attempts to join the
European Union” (Stojanovic, Huffington Post, 2012).
Although it is undeniable that the defeated president, Boris Tadic, was more pro-Western
and pro-European Union the nationalistic credentials of Nikolic were overrated. Tadic
never showed a real intention of diplomatic compromise in the recognition of Kosovo’s
independence. The Western problem with Nikolic is that he envisages Serbs has the
“natural” leaders of the Balkans and, according some experts, he also aims in a long-term
to integrate Serbia into Russia Federation.
Elections in Serbia were unfair because the proposals available for voters were amongst
moderate-open-nationalism and radical-exclusivist-nationalism. Serbia it’s a good
representation of state that was captured, to use Vesna Pesic concept, by an oligarchy
despite all the enormous efforts made to control and ease the phenomenon. Inequality is
an a priori systemic characteristic that conditions a posteriori transformations that can be
made possible through electoral vote.
In March 2012 “Russian voters overwhelmingly granted Vladimir Putin a six-year term as
president on Sunday, a widely expected outcome” (Herszenhorn, New York Times, 2012),
that did not avoided claims of vote irregularities and suspicious about the validity and
fairness of the electoral procedure. Previous to the elections Grigory Yavlinsky (founder of
the liberal party Yabloko) and Dmitry Mezentsev (Irkutsk Governor) were dismissed from
elections due to legal-administrative reasons.
Although Vladimir Putin has faced some real opposition, unlike Nazarbayev, at the
presidential elections we have to bear in mind the dominance of his United Russia in the
majority of the 83 regions (controlling 2,840 of 3,787 seats at the regional parliaments);
the domain at the State Duma (with a recent victory in December 2011 that ensured 238
mandates, out of 450 available seats); the centralizing administrative reforms triggered in
2004 and the personal preponderance of Putin (now three-times President and two-times
Prime-Minister) since 1999. All those combined diminish greatly the prospects for real
democracy in Russia.
The third group is named democratic illusions. After the initial optimism that followed the
collapse of the Soviet Union and the independentist parade the hopes on the prospects of
democratization across the entire post-soviet space fade away. In some cases like
Belarus, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan “rather than producing stalemate, compromise,
and pacted transitions to democracy, [the transitological set] (…) resulted in protracted
confrontation, yielding unconsolidated, unstable partial democracies and autocracies”
(McFaul, 2002, p. 214).
Kazakhstan most recent parliamentary elections confirmed the dominance of Nazarbayev
at the country’s political system with his party collecting more than 80 percent of the votes.
The election was less real and substantial than it was initially expected. Although “the vote
may have ended Kazakhstan’s one-party parliament (…) the two new entrants are propresidential parties and not genuine opposition” (Kilner, Telegraph, 2012), unchanging the
power-balance of a prone to autocracy regime that concedes limited citizenship rights.
The elections were slammed by International Observers has unfair and undemocratic.
In September 2012 “international observers (…) condemned a weekend vote in Belarus in
which not a single opposition politician won a parliament seat” (Karmanau, Huffington
Post, 2012); all mandates were distributed among the three pro-president political forces.
Presidential elections in mid-December 2010 confirmed Alexander Lukashenko as
President of Belarus amid a series of protests against rigged results and unfair voting that
ended with more than 700 activists arrested.
On February 2012 in a equally undisputed election “Turkmen President Kurbanguly
Berdymukhamedov won 97 percent of votes in an election that cemented his absolute rule
of a Central Asian state holding 4 percent of the world's natural gas reserves” (Paxton,
Reuters, 2012). The lack of candidates and the limitations on several rights and freedoms
made OSCE decide not to monitor these elections whose result was known since the
elections were scheduled. The only thing that was a semi-surprise was the number: 97%
of (supposed-to-be) popular approval!
What is after all the value of elections?
We can conclude that although elections are a legitimizing mechanism, like we have
argued previously, they do not operate as democratizing tools. Elections across the postsoviet space are something closer to a mirror: they reflect the density and seriousness of
democratization in post-soviet states.
Throughout our analysis it seems clear that “after the sudden collapse of communist and
numerous other autocratic regimes, transition to ‘electoral democracy’ has arguably
became much easier (…) but the deepening of democracy and improving the performance
of democratic regimes have became much more difficult” (Andreev, 2005, p. 3). Elections
can no longer be considered the sole instrument needed to signal the existence of new
democratic regimes.
Valerie Bunce gives us some precious notes on the debate towards the building of more
meaningful democracies across the post-soviet space. According to the expert we have to
take into consideration two interrelated dimensions: first “the consolidation of democracy
[that] refers to the degree to which the key elements of a democratic order are in place,
and whether those elements function to promote effective, inclusive, and account able
governance. [And secondly] the sustainability of democracy refers, simply, to the
continuation of democratic rule” (Bunce, 2003, p. 179).
Only through a more demanding notion of democracy, that has to go beyond electoralism
as a democratic flag, it is possible to initiate a new phase of serious transformation across
the post-soviet space. Democratic systems in post-soviet countries do not have to be a
copy of Western models of democracy but in this new crafting it is important to have in
mind all the lessons learned from Western democratic achievements and failures. Of
course we do not intend to minimize the enormous value of elections in democratic frontrunners. What we criticize is the tendency to overvalue elections in semi-democratic or
hybrid regimes and illusion democracies.
Elections are important to legitimize political leaders and political transformations but they
are voided if not accompanied by profound, multidimensional reforms that ensure the
openness of the state to a meaningful and equal experience of citizenship by all citizens.
To sum up, when elections in the post-soviet space are not accompanied with those
democratizing reforms “many new democracies [will] have to contend with the danger of
decay, of less spectacular, more incremental, and less transparent forms of regression”
(Schedler, 1998, p. 97), that will ultimately endanger a truthful transformationconsolidation towards a more democratic regime.
Tiago Ferreira LOPES* – Analyst, Strategic Outlook
*Researcher at the Orient Institute (ISCSP – UTL, Portugal)
**Researcher and Administrator at the State Building and Fragility Monitor
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