Rules should be followed. If when rules are broken no punishment is applied, the rules are meaningless. Once rules become meaningless, everyone will be emboldened to break the rules, to the detriment of society as a whole.
If you want the rules changed, vote for them being changed, don't give free pass for any asshole to break them.
> Rules should be followed.
But free, democratic elections is a "rule" too -- not just a rule, but a bedrock principle.
Why should people be prevented from voting now for someone because of previous rules made by a previous electorate? Why should someone from the past be allowed to nullify my preferred vote in the present?
There's always something inherently anti-democratic about preventing someone from running for office. The question is whether it's outweighed by other democratic concerns. It's messy.
All elections follow rules set by a previous electorate unless you want to first vote on defining the rules for an election every time you have an election.
If Trump were to actually run for a 3rd term, would you argue that he should be able to because term limits were set in place by a previous electorate?
But there is definitely a serious philosophical argument that term limits are inherently undemocratic.
I personally think they're necessary, but at the same time I realize they are undemocratic. They're literally taking away the ability for an electorate to freely choose.
All I'm saying is, the tradeoffs get messy. Restricting candidates from running can be a slippery slope. Look at what's happening in Turkey, where the popular opposition candidate was just barred from running. How do you know when you've gone too far? Barring candidates can corruptly entrench power, even when following the "rules" to the letter. What then?
> term limits are inherently undemocratic
A society where the people are not able to participate in the electoral process is not a democratic society. True democracies represent the will of all people, regardless of whether they are part of the majority or whether they were eligible to vote in the single election which transitioned the political system from democracy to dictatorship.
The rules can be changed but again there are rules for how to do that! It's rules all the way down.
You can't have a functioning democratic system without rules.
The problems start when people start thinking that rules don't matter or aren't applied evenly.
Bold claim. Bold claims require bold evidence. You provided none.
> Look at what's happening in Turkey, where the popular opposition candidate was just barred from running.
Are you aware of the current situation in Turkey? If that's not bold evidence, I literally don't know what is.
If France failed to punish Le Pen, they would be takinya step into creating their own French Erdogan.
Are you really so sure?
Why was she the only one barred from running from office? Why not the other eight officials also found guilty?
Yes.
> Why was she the only one barred from running from office?
Because she was judged by an independent court and found guilty of embezzlement.
> Why not the other eight officials also found guilty?
I would have to read the decision to give this answer. Many things are considered when a judge gives out a sentence. Two murders may result in different prison length depending on circumstances, for example.
I'll just leave you with this considered analysis:
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2025/04/01/why-marine-le-p...
Particularly:
> The crimes of which Ms Le Pen has been convicted are serious, but not of the same order. France’s harsh sentence in this case limits the choice of citizens who are capable of judging for themselves who should get their vote. By creating a mechanism that politicians might be thought to have co-opted, the law encourages talk of conspiracy—especially if, like Ms Le Pen, the barred politician belongs to a party that is founded upon a suspicion of the elites.
> The danger of courts aggressively sentencing politicians is that both the law and the courts become seen as partisan. Judiciaries rely on citizens accepting verdicts with which they disagree. Elections are supposed to generate consent for the incoming government. A poll after Ms Le Pen’s conviction found just 54% of French thought she was treated like any other accused, a narrow margin of confidence in judicial independence. Among RN voters, 89% thought she was singled out for political reasons.
That vote would be tainted by her embezzlement of campaign funds. The rest of this analysis is void once the author fails to consider how badly democracy can be damaged once election regulations are not respected.
Of course, the author may jave ulterior motives, and wants to defend Le Pen in this case because he wants to see democracy in Europe weakened from within. But I sm giving the benefit of doubt here and presuming stupidity rather than malice.
You, on the other hand, are presenting Marine Le Pen as a threat to democracy, presumably because you don't like the far right. But you're just one voter. Why not trust the electorate? Voters chose Giorgia Meloni and I don't see Italian democracy falling apart.
I'm not far right at all. I'm not even right. But I worry it's dangerous and will backfire to take choice away from an electorate because of some misuse of funds (that didn't benefit herself financially) that she is already being heavily punished for at a personal level. She's being punished. Voters shouldn't be by taking away their right to choose.
This is not up to voters to decide. If Le Pen murdered someone it wouldn't be up to voters for decide if the murder mattered.
Politicians don't have a separate legal system for them that allow voters to be judges. They are subject to the same intependent judiciary.
All the rest of your response falls apart after that.
Ironically Turkey is in this situation precisely because Erdogan removed term limits and spent decades consolidating his power. Same with China where Xi Jinping did the same. And Russia with Putin. All prime examples of functioning democracies, right?
These rules are specially to prevent people from setting themselves up as emperor for life and if they are removed that's almost always the exact thing that happens.
Democracy isn't a perfect system, as much as Americans tend to believe it is. It needs some guidelines to keep it functional. And even with them it's a compromise, not perfection.
Only when the rules are respected by everyone involved.
If we are playing football (or soccer for the barbarians across the pond), a core principle is to score goals. If in the middle of the game I punch you in the face, that principle stops mattering super fast.
> Why should people be prevented from voting now for someone because of previous rules made by a previous electorate?
Because that is how rules and regulations work. If you want them changed, change them properly, don't go breaking them because your pet right wing politician was punished for breaking them.
> There's always something inherently anti-democratic about preventing someone from running for office
I fundamentally disagree. The only thing anti-democratic is to allow someone that does not respect the democratic rules for running for office, for they will undermine democracy from within.
Surely you see the catch in this belief. If there is a group of people who can "allow" others to run for election then the system is not democratic at its core.
It is democratic at its core. Any democracy has an independent judicial system that can ensure that rules are being followed properly.
Separation of powers between executive, legislative and judiciary, does it ring a bell to you?
If the judiciary stops doing its job of banning those that would cheat elections, you wouldn't have a democracy anymore.
I enthusiastically endorse the separation of powers and firmly believe that people should follow systems, not people. Perhaps it just a global coincidence, but the recent spate of candidate disqualification (US, Romania, Turkey, France) gives the appearance of democratic decay.
Then don't assume the judiciary is biased by following up with a disclaim that you are repeating baseless conjecture. Le Pen was judged with her right to legal defense, found guity, and punished accordingly. This is democracy working as it should.
> I enthusiastically endorse the separation of powers and firmly believe that people should follow systems, not people.
Based on the content of your posts, I sincerely doubt your enthusiastic endorsement.
You are very quick to make excuses for the right wing politician that was punished for embezzlement, claimed repeatedly that her being banned from office is undemocratic, and claimed without a shred of evidence that the court that judged her is biased.
Forgive me if I think you are bullshitting me here.
> Perhaps it just a global coincidence, but the recent spate of candidate disqualification (US, Romania, Turkey, France) gives the appearance of democratic decay.
Comparing France to Turkey is pure bad faith argumentation. If you genuinely think that Turkey and France share any sort of democratic decay you are very ill informed.
If Le Pen was not punished, I would agree France was taking a step in creating its own French Erdogan.
But if the people involved are not making up crimes, but prosecuting crimes; if they are not targeting people specifically, but enforcing the law that applies to everyone; and if they are allowing for the maximum possible due process, then there really isn't much of a case for that process being anti-democratic.
i’m curious, do you think age minimums are ok? i feel like with this opinion have to throw out all restrictions on the ability to run for office to be consistent.
That's entirely the wrong way to think about government. Government isn't about rules, it's about allocation of power. You have to think about government in terms of who is entrusted with power to make which decisions. If you entrust judges and lawyers to decide "when rules are broken" by elected officials, you give them power over those officials, and over voters.
Now that's okay to a degree, but the question is: where does the buck stop? If you design a system where the buck stops with lawyers and judges, then you've effectively given those lawyers and judges power to overrule voters. It's better to design a system where the lawyers and judges demur in situations like this, to avoid a "tail wagging the dog" situation where the legal system is invoked to resolve a political dispute.
What you are describing is the judiciary in any functioning democracy. Separation of powers requires an independent judiciary system.
They have to be unelected, so they keep their independence when evaluating if the laws are being applied according to the written law.
> Now that's okay to a degree, but the question is: where does the buck stop?
With proper separation of powers and an independent justice system, like the one that judged Le Pen and found her guilty.
I would only see thorniness is the courts refused to punish Le Pen out of fear of punishing a somewhat popular politician, as this would embolden others to act in ways to break the rules, and would undermine the independence of the court, which is a core tenet of a functioning democracy.
I think you only see thorniness here because you wanted Le Pen to keep doing her thing. See? it works both ways.
The way out of your conundrum is to admit there is no "the People"; there is a collection of diverging, often incoherent trends, and no voting system is perfect (no voting system is even logical, as proven by Condorcet and Arrow[0])
[0] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/arrows-impossibility-th...
https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/democracy-and-republ...
The fundamental democratic principle is the same.
And we measure the will of the people in elections, without having to worry about Arrow... it's procedural.
(2002 election, not 1995 - my bad)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_French_presidential_elect...
In English, more-or-less: > A society is democratic if it acknowledge that it is divided, which means that it contains contradictory interests, and if it creates modality to analyse and debate these contradictions so that we can reach arbitration, with each citizen having an equal share in the debate.
I don't believe that a society is democratic if a majority of the people have decided something that is harmful or unfair to a minority without properly having debated if this decision is fair or not for the minority.
Because of that, no, it's not "whatever the majority decides". In a democracy, the will to guarantee justice and fairness is more important than "the people", and if they say "there is suspicion of fraud from this candidate but let's just close our eyes because we like this person or because it is profitable for us", this is clearly a behavior where they are not trying to reach a just and fair situation.
This is what distinguish democracy from ochlocracy.
And I don't understand how people can really defend that we should ignore the justice/fairness condition: what is the point of following "the people" when these people are not trying to be just and fair? How will it be a good society?
Ultimately, rules come from the people in a democracy.
If they decide they want a candidate who broke the rules, that's where it gets messy in political philosophy.
Should the democratic will of the people from years ago or decades ago override the democratic will of the people now? Of course that's the general idea of having constitutions and such, but it can only ever be a matter of degree, and there's no right answer as to how much.