By: Chris Komari, Activist Democracy, Activist Forum Tanah Air (FTA)
SwaraSenayan.com. Modern democracy is definitely far advance and better, much better than those ancient democracy in Greece.
In the old ancient democracy in Greece, even though there were separation of power and checks and balances, however, there wasn’t many things that modern democracy have today to strengthen the sovereignty of the people.
In the ancient democracy in Greece:
(1). There wasn’t freedom of the press.
(2). There wasn’t recall election.
(3). There wasn’t social contracts between the demos (people) and the candidates,
(4). There wasn’t ballot proposition, ballot measure and neither, ballot initiative.
(5). There wasn’t control mechanism that could be used by the ancient Greek people to control, oversight and replace it’s representatives.
In the absence of FREE PRESS in the old ancient democracy, the demos (people) and the demes (10 tribes) were often time mislead, misinformed, uninformed, ill-informed, ignorant, unaware and brain-washed by slick willy politicians who were unqualified and least qualified to hold public positions.
For that matter, the ancient Greece democracy and election generated leaders that were deemed to be unsuitable to run the country by many ancient greek philosophers, such as kakistocracy and kleptocracy.
Today’s free press and free media still some of them, are being used to mislead the demos to suit some special interests.
Even though, modern democracy is not perfect, but at least in the modern democracy, the demos (people) have control mechanism to RECALL public officials and people’s representatives who are deemed to be detrimental to the interest of the demos at large that can be replaced at any time through recall election.
Unfortunately, recall election is not yet being recognized and implemented in Indonesia.
Recall election is significant power in the modern democracy to maintain the sovereignty of the people over the agencies and the representatives who serve them.
This is something that the old ancient democracy in Greece didn’t have. *SS
