Aftonbladet eller Expressen, vilken tur att vi har demokrati!

Jag har fått lära mig om demokrati i skolan
Det betyder "folk styre", ordet kommer från Grekland

Aftonbladet eller Expressen, vilken tur att vi har demokrati

Pepsi eller Coca-Cola, vilken tur att vi har demokrati.

"Demokrati" - by Knugen Faller

(In English - I have learned about democracy in school, it means "the people's rule", the word comes from Greece. Aftonbladet or Expressen (two of Sweden's largest newspapers), how lucky we are to have democracy. Pespi or Coke, how lucky we are to have democracy.)

Oooo, little bit of politics there.

With the election coming up in Sweden I've been thinking a bit about how it really works. How democratic is democracy really?



Democracy is famously founded in ancient Greece in Athens and was set up to be a way of making sure the people of Greece were fairly represented and it was fairly decided what happened to the country.

A few drawbacks however. Firstly only around 300 people decided what happened. The 300 were men, and rich men at that. No one poor, no one young, no one who was a slave (or had been a slave), no one who wasn't Athenian and certainly no women were allowed to have a voice.

Only adult male Athenian citizens who had completed their military training had the right to vote in Athens. This excluded a majority of the population. Athenian citizenship was also only for males born from a father who was citizen.

So not really Democracy...but how different is it today?

In my school today we looked at the classroom to see how many of us were eligible to vote in the upcoming election and out of a class of 30 it was only 3. One of which was the teacher. Admittedly my class if for adults taking basic education in Swedish so the majority is immigrants yet most of us had lived there for quite some time. I have lived in Sweden for 6 years and am as yet still not allowed citizenship.

• Stockholm has a population of around 3-4 million (including suburbs). With a population of around 10 million in the whole country that's about 40%.
• This means of course that almost half of the voting public will be geared towards the capital city.
• Around 2 million in Sweden are immigrants so that's around 20% that don't get a say, despite the majority of us working, paying tax and living as a providing member of the community.

How democratic is democracy?

There are countless claims of how George W.Bush managed to swing voting in his favour not once but twice. Two of the biggest alleged tricks were that voters living abroad didn't get their ballot papers, or got them late. The other was that convicted criminals were not allowed to vote (the theory being that the majority were African-Americans or Hispanic-Americans), also if your name happened to match that of a convicted criminal you were also not allowed to vote, being that it would eradicate a lot of "foreign" names from the voting roll meant that the more right-wing voters stood a much better chance.

There are also claims of rigged election counts in Florida and Ohio.

One of my personal theories is that we as a society are fed shit and kept stupid in order to discourage us from thinking about, or at least being properly informed about any political awareness.

From the 60s through to the 80s popular culture was rife with a political awareness. What happened? My theory is that "they" swapped our Public Enemys for Jay-Zs, our Crass's for Sum 41s. By the time we've all finished voting for who will win Big Brother, Pop Idol and Robinson...we can't be bothered to look into anything else.