Mr. Romano Prodi is, according to the Italian Supreme Court, the new Prime Minister of Italy. The court, following the review of some 5,000 disputed ballots, officially declared the victory of Mr. Prodi. The future of the Italian government is still under dispute due to the fact that current Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and his Forza Italia party are refusing to concede defeat. Berlusconi has cited what he calls widespread irregularities in the vote and election process. The court’s decision officially marks the end of Berlusconi’s five-year term as prime minister. The election also resulted in a split in the country’s bicameral parliament, with only 67 seats separating the parties in the lower Chamber of Deputies and a mere two seats separating them in the Senate.
I am reminded of several elections in which the results were supposedly too close to call but which yielded clear winners and losers in the minds of the voting populace. Chief among them are the no-longer-recent UK elections that narrowly re-elected Prime Minister Blair, the even more narrowly chosen Chancellor Merkel of Germany, and even our very own highly contested Grand Marshal race. We must not suffer from the illusion that these are the only closely contested democratic races; there have been countless others around the world recently, including some in countries like Columbia, Australia, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and here in the United States. All of this leads one to the inevitable conclusion that democracy in its presently adopted form needs to be purged and begun again.
I have no doubt that any person on this campus could come up with a more fair way of running elections and democratic governments than what is presently seen on this campus and around the world. It is a simple matter of putting out ballots, counting them, and declaring a winner. I realize that it is difficult for many people to say things as they are and tell someone that he has lost, but whether a person wins by four votes or by four million votes, the voice of the majority must be respected. That is the basis of all democracy.
As I take one of my routine walks across campus, I see the same things happening here that I have seen happening in Germany and the world; I see the loud leading the quiet into government without responsibility or loyalty. Clement Attlee once wrote, “Democracy means government by discussion, but it is only effective if you can stop people talking.” What we now have is a system where the loud silence the masses in order to accomplish what they want. Perhaps now with the administration’s New Direction policy, the voters of this campus will no longer be silent, but rather speak with one voice and help end this crisis of silence that is destroying the democratic process here at Rensselaer and beyond.
