Liberal democracy under fire: historic mistake or useful farce?

Democracy as the Trojan horse of Europe's decline

Since the Transition, consensus in Spain took for granted that representative democracy was the best possible option. But a careful analysis of its results – economic stagnation, loss of sovereignty, institutional mediocrity – has been feeding a current that questions whether the model was nothing more than a textbook historic mistake. This is not nostalgia for dictatorships, but a structural critique that deserves to be examined with data, not slogans.

Universal suffrage as the Achilles heel

One of the most solid lines of argument points to universal suffrage as the origin of the problem. In classical Greece, only 25% of the population voted; the rest were excluded by criteria of capacity and property. Extending the vote to everyone, without requirements of education or responsibility, would have generated a system where decisions are made by the average voter – the one who, in Churchill's own words, is the best argument against democracy in a five-minute conversation. The result: governments competing with unsustainable promises, chronic deficits and a political class that thrives on mediocrity.

The farce of representation: parties as organs of the State

In Spain, the closed-list and public-funding model has turned parties into appendages of the State, not instruments of civil society. Unlike the US, where parties barely coordinate primaries and the candidate depends on his own support, here the leaderships appoint candidates and control the lists. The consequence is a partitocracy that takes turns in power without real accountability, as seen with the PPSOE for decades. The absence of binding referendums – not even on entry into the euro – reveals the oligarchic nature of a system that dresses up as democracy but functions as a lottery of local mafias, according to some analyses.

The party State as a revolving door to decadence

The evolution of Spanish democracy dangerously resembles the Weimar Republic: a system with formal requirements but no real control of power. Meanwhile, the EU and NATO have acted as corsets limiting national sovereignty, turning elections into a mere formality. The comparison with Argentina is recurrent: without the crutch of the ECB, the country would have already collapsed. All this fuels the thesis that liberal democracy is nothing more than a Trojan horse – as one analyst put it – for external enemies to plunder the country without the need for war.

The way out: technical or elitist?

Among the proposals, two currents stand out: one advocating restricting the vote (convicts, functional illiterates, etc.) and another defending an enlightened technocracy. The first clashes head-on with formal equality; the second, with the liberal tradition. The question remains whether any democracy has survived the mediocrity of its own demos. Churchill had his famous phrase, but the 21st century is putting it to the test.

With these ingredients, the debate over whether democracy was a mistake moves away from caricature and enters the terrain of impossible reforms. Those who think all is lost have at least one consolation: the Romans went from republic to dictatorship and then to empire. We are doing the reverse.