Europe's Vulnerable Democracy

After decades of advance, democracy in Europe has begun to look curiously vulnerable.

Paul Lay | Published in 10 Jan 2012

Greek philosophers and thinkers assemble at Plato's Academy in the Renaissance fresco by Raphael, 1510, known as the 'School of Athens' There are two fewer democracies in Europe than there were this time last year. The democratically elected governments of Greece and Italy have been replaced by ones made up of unelected ‘technocrats’. The reaction, within those countries and without, has been relatively muted. Though the political systems of both have become bywords for corruption, incompetence and, in the case of Italy, buffoonery, it is still worrying that true democracy can be shelved so easily to be replaced by a ‘managed democracy’, a euphemism employed chillingly by the authorities in China, whose lack of popular accountability combined with rising prosperity threatens to become some kind of model.