Five important countries — France, Iran, Mexico, Russia and the United States — hold elections this year; each will say they are democratic.
Two have taken place. Iran held parliamentary elections Friday. Russia held presidential elections Sunday. The United States is already into the weeds of its campaigns, even though the elections aren’t until November.
Iran’s elections are better described as contested, rather than democratic.
First, all candidates must be vetted by a council of ayatollahs. This means that any potential candidate who might be considered disruptive to the smooth functioning of the country’s theocratic system cannot even make it onto the ballot. (According to Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum, based on his view of the separation between church and state, John F. Kennedy should not have made it past even this first barrier in the United States.)
Second, Iran does not have political parties. We can put aside the question of whether America’s experience with parties justifies Iran’s practice in that regard, but what it means is that candidates in Iran are divided into factions on the basis of their loyalty to either an approach or to an individual politician. This time it was “the principalists,” supporters of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, opposed to those who line up with President Mahmoud Ahmahdinejad. Iran’s populist Green Movement, which emerged badly damaged from the 2009 presidential elections, stayed out.
The supreme leader’s supporters appear to have won big, to the extent that Mr. Khamenei is thinking of using his large majority in parliament to abolish the office of president altogether, making the head of government a prime minister elected by parliament, which he will control.
Now, does this make Iran a flexible democracy, or a theocratic dictatorship posing as a democracy, or what? It’s probably as close to representative, participatory government as Iran is going to get for now. And it is lively.
Russia showed itself Sunday as just as more democratic.
One party, United Russia, headed by Vladimir V. Putin, runs the show and swept the elections. He came to power in 1999, was elected president in 2000, then switched positions with Prime Minister Dimitry A. Medvedev in 2008 and now has switched them again, with Mr. Putin returning as president and Mr. Medvedev as prime minister. Mr. Putin may choose to run for a second term in 2018. If he wins then, too, by 2024 he will have been in power a quarter of a century — czar class, almost Stalin class.
Then there is the United States. It may be the only one of the major countries holding elections this year where a presidential candidate could win a majority of the votes and lose the election. This is because of America’s Electoral College system, a bizarre remnant of the formation of the union.
One of the basic concepts of the United States of America is representative government — that if it is the will of the people to change something it can be changed. But not the Electoral College. “Representative” in principle should mean “flexible.” But what it comes down to is that American democracy does not mean one person, one vote, at least not when it comes to the presidency.
The other hammerlock that tradition has on democracy in the United States is the two-party system. One can see the logic of the Democrats wanting to run as their candidate an incumbent president who has done a reasonable job. But the idea that whomever the Republican Party finally chooses will be the other significant name on the ballot gets crazier by the day. The ideological and spiritual distance between Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul makes it such that the nation’s voters — not just Republicans — should have the chance to choose among these four.
Those who disagree should try to imagine any three of the above agreeing to unite forces in support of whichever of them finally gets the Republican call. It isn’t just the ugliness that has emerged between them as they have dueled over the nomination, it is also the ideological distance between them.
There is also an argument that President Barack Obama, too, would have benefited from a challenge within the Democratic Party from the right or the left, but no such luck.