Are Free Elections Too Risky?

Believers in democracy have suffered many disappointments recently. We had free elections in Gaza, in Egypt, in Russia, in Ukraine, in Iraq, and in many other countries – with dire consequences. Perhaps we should give up hope.

Last Saturday (June 21), Doug Saunders wrote in The Globe and Mail:

“It’s tempting, at moments like this, to say that. But there are two flaws in this reasoning. First, it is to abandon people to their fate prematurely, simply because we forget human history: democracy became the shovel we Westerners used to dig ourselves out of destitution only after we had spent decades using it to batter one another over the head. It took generations before the Robespierres and Cromwells were worked out of the system.”

Of course he is right.

Should anyone be tempted to add Weimar Germany to the list of democratic regimes that came to an end as the result of a free election – that is what many people believe – let us remind them that this is not so.

Hitler was never elected in a free election. In the last free election before January 30, 1933, when he assumed power, the election of November 6, 2025 - the Nazi party’s fortunes were significantly in decline.

Nor was there a coup.He was appointed because his sympathisers managed to outwit the senile president Hindenburg. Hitler assumed power constitutionally. Not long after he assumed power, he outlawed the opposition.

Perhaps Germany had to go through this experience before it could have a decent democracy accepted by a vast majority. That was not the case in Weimar Germany.