{"id":53421,"date":"2025-11-23T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-11-23T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/?p=53421"},"modified":"2025-11-22T21:11:55","modified_gmt":"2025-11-23T00:11:55","slug":"abstention-democracy-voluntary-servitude","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/abstention-democracy-voluntary-servitude\/","title":{"rendered":"Abstention: from people\u2019s power to voluntary servitude"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In Argentina\u2019s legislative elections on October 26, where voting was mandatory, only 68% of the electorate cast their ballots. Sixty-eight percent \u2014 the exact same rate as Cuba\u2019s legislative elections in November 2022. In other words, a democratic election in Argentina drew the same turnout as one held under a dictatorship in Cuba. That should provoke reflection on the state of democracy \u2014 and it does. The problem is that the reflection always leads to the same easy conclusions, which fail to spark real debate because they merely reaffirm what everyone already believes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What lies behind such low participation? Months before the vote, after seven consecutive elections with poor turnout, journalist Claudio Jacquelin<\/a> identified three possible explanations: the lack of appeal of legislative elections and candidates, public discontent with politics, and the country\u2019s dire economic situation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

But what does \u201clack of appeal\u201d mean? Are elections supposed to be attractive<\/em>? Isn\u2019t choosing the people\u2019s representatives attractive enough? Or do we now expect democratic participation to be as entertaining as a concert by our favorite band?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The claim of \u201cdiscontent with politics\u201d is even more striking. Democracy exists precisely so that citizens can remove those who generate discontent. What logic justifies abstaining from voting because<\/em> one is dissatisfied with those in power? It\u2019s like installing a burglar alarm, and when thieves break in, turning it off because the noise is annoying.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Moreover, if the goal is to express discontent through the vote<\/a>, wouldn\u2019t a blank or null ballot be more meaningful? Abstention can easily be read as apathy or laziness, whereas blank or null votes demonstrate a deliberate choice: a citizen made the effort to go to the polls but found no suitable candidate. That was exactly the strategy used by Algerian progressive leader Zoubida Assoul, who promoted blank voting in protest against Algeria\u2019s \u201cprocedural elections\u201d in 2024.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Abstention can indeed be a valid form of protest, but only when the system offers no democratic alternative, as in Cuba. During the 2022 elections, the Cuban opposition explicitly encouraged abstention as a form of rejection. \u201cWe hope for a high level of abstention to say no to the dictatorship,\u201d said activist Carolina Barreiro<\/a>. Abstention, in this sense, is a message directed against an illegitimate regime, not against democratic candidates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is not unique to Latin America. In Algeria, voter participation fell from 74% in 2009 to 40% in 2019. Globally, the average voter turnout in 2024 stood at 62%<\/a>, ten points lower than in 2004. Earlier this year, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni even urged citizens to abstain from a referendum \u2014 and she succeeded: only 30% of eligible voters participated, well below the 50% + 1 threshold required for validity. Instead of campaigning for a \u201cno\u201d vote, Meloni campaigned for no vote<\/em>. As union leader Maurizio Landini admitted, the high abstention clearly revealed Italy\u2019s democratic crisis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To move beyond these simplistic explanations, we must accept that democracy may not be what we thought it was \u2014 at least not as we understand it today. Literally, democracy<\/em> means \u201cpower of the people.\u201d Nothing more. It doesn\u2019t imply that the people\u2019s power is inalienable or permanent. Power, if not exercised, ceases to exist. When people stop exercising their power, they renounce it \u2014 and without the people\u2019s power, there is no democracy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Does this create a power vacuum? Does democracy give way to anarchy? Certainly not. Someone will inevitably occupy the power that the people abandon. We may not know who it will be or what they will do with it, but one thing is certain: it will not be democracy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We have various terms for non-democratic systems \u2014 dictatorship, autocracy, authoritarianism. They all share a comforting connotation: they absolve the people of responsibility by blaming a single tyrant who \u201cseizes\u201d power. Yet this is a distortion. When citizens willingly relinquish their political power, the regime that emerges has a very different name \u2014 one coined by the 16th-century French philosopher \u00c9tienne de La Bo\u00e9tie: voluntary servitude.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

*Machine translation, proofread by Ricardo Aceves.<\/sub><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The decline in electoral participation reveals a troubling crisis: when the people stop voting, democracy becomes hollow and moves, by its own decision, toward \u2018voluntary servitude\u2019.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":283,"featured_media":53424,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"episode_type":"","audio_file":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","filesize_raw":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","itunes_episode_number":"","itunes_title":"","itunes_season_number":"","itunes_episode_type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[16818,16844],"tags":[17180],"gps":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-53421","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-elecciones-en","8":"category-democracia-en","9":"tag-ideas"},"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53421","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/283"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53421"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53421\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/53424"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53421"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53421"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53421"},{"taxonomy":"gps","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/latinoamerica21.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/gps?post=53421"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}