Spinning into control
It was a rare beast. In the decades since, that club has expanded enormously. Yes, many of the new democracies have their flaws, but wherever I have travelled, whether it’s in Mozambique or the Caucasus, in Taiwan or Albania, there’s still a feel-good factor to being able to chuck the devils out.
In advanced European democracies like Ireland, cynicism abounds: too many politicians on the take, too little idealism, too much money in politics, and far too much pandering to the swing voters. How indulgent our complaints must sound to the billions of people in the world who don’t know what a polling station is, or what it’s like to have more than one party on the ballot paper.
