DIFFERENCES IN ELECTIONS

Historians will probably look back on this week with interest, as both of the world's current superpowers, namely the United States and China, hold elections to find new leaders at almost exactly the same moment in time. A large part of that interest will be due to the different ways in which those elections are held.

In America, where Barack Obama has just got reelected (more on that another time), two candidates stand against each other in the political equivalent of a boxing contest. They spend huge amounts of time and effort, telling anyone who will listen (and many who don't want to) how awful the other guy is, and that you would be mad to vote for him. There are TV debates and detailed policy discussions, acres of forest are felled in order to provide comments and predictions, the result is close to the end. All of this is incredibly public. Finally, one man wins and gets the glory, the other walks off into the sunset and political oblivion.

Acorss the globe in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China has just started its 10-yearly leadership change. In Chinese politics, nobody says anything really substantive about anything, there are certainly no debates, and no leader spends his time denigrating his rivals (in public, at any rate). Money is spent, but not on political activities, more on extra security to ensure that no ordinary people get anywhere near the building. Oddest of all, everybody knows in advance who is going to win, though nobody is quite sure how the decision is made or who actually makes it. Finally, people who miss out on the top job are usually found some sort of compensation at a slightly lower level.

Which system is better? We often assume in the rich world that our way of doing things is automatically the best, and we often forget that there are other ways of doing things. Certainly, from my son's recent experiences in China, he would say that ordinary Chinese value stability and collective harmony more than the individual pursuit of happiness that seems to drive us. If that is true, then why shouldn't Chinese democracy be different from ours (both of which, incidentally, are different from "true" democracy, as practised in ancient Athens)? In the general election of 1868, William Gladstone came a humiliating third in the two-member seat of South West Lancashire, and became Prime Minister only because he was at the same time elected M.P. for Greenwich, it then being possible to stand in two constituencies at the same time. Since Gladstone's 1868-74 Ministry was  one of the most successful Governments of the 19th century, should we complain because it was the result of "undemocratic" processes? We may dislike the Chinese extreme; but watching the avalanche of money in the U.S. is not particularly edifying either.

As it happens, there was a third election this week, which was my favourite. The Coptic Church in Egypt chose their new leader by having the names of the candidates placed on bits of paper in a bowl, and having a blindfolded boy pick one of them. It didn't take very long, was undeniably cheap, could not be predicted in advance, and - being influenced directly by God - was accepted without protest by all concerned. How about introducing the same system for the E.U.?

Walter Blotscher