‘Day my happiness vanished’

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A month before the Corona pandemic, the sober British magazine The Economist issued a report related to democracy in various countries of the world. Since nothing radical has occurred to the core of the matter, nor the basis on which it was built, the report remains valid.

I felt happy as I read through the report, and I wondered what I would have felt if I were a citizen of a dictatorial state whose citizens have no right to breathe without the intelligence services counting their breaths. I also felt happy and expected to see my country’s name among a beautiful group of other democracies in the world and before reading the report I even decided to distribute it to the groups and emails on my contact list, to show them our political status.

It appears from the content of the report, which is cited by the majority of global stakeholders, the democracy of any country is based on 60 sub-criteria – based on the following five foundations: the electoral process, pluralism, government action, political participation, political culture, democracy and civil liberties.

The study included 165 United Nations members (countries) and two other regions. The countries are also classified into four levels: full democracy, flawed democracy, a hybrid regime, and fourth, a dictatorial regime.

I hoped, according to my understanding and expectation, to find our democracy in the first category, as our elections are free and fair. Voters also feel safe, and as far as I know, there is no external influence on the government, and government employees can effectively and practically implement public policies, all of which were given high importance in the report, and therefore I expected that Kuwait would be in the global ranking with Norway, Iceland, and the rest of the other advanced Western countries, but I was disappointed, or perhaps I had expected too much.

I continued reading down the line fully expecting to find Kuwait among the countries with flawed democracies. There may be defects that we did not notice and we will be with South Korea and Japan, or Estonia or Taiwan, but my hope faded as my imagination told me ‘definitely’ my country will be on the list of countries of the same hybrid systems as Ukraine, Albania, Senegal, Georgia or Nepal, etc, but here too I was disappointed, and I became somewhat embarrassed.

I looked at the bottom of the list, and to the countries classified as dictatorships, and I found the name of Kuwait listed among them – the country which has a democracy it is proud of it among all its peers, but ranked 115th, preceded by Jordan and everything that comes to mind comes about countries and woes. I regretted sending the report to the group and revealing our worse condition.

We are in front of one of the two options either reviewing our ‘democratic’ situation or buying the consciences of the ‘Economist’ editors, and silencing them forever.

After spending much on the ink, and the pure voices that sing about our democracy, we do not accept  that while doing nothing.

For your information, the magazine ranked America on the list of flawed democracies. Trump’s threats to sabotage the process of democracy, and the failure to acknowledge its results proved the correctness of the Economist classification.

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By Ahmad alsarraf

This news has been read 12426 times!