The Greek Referendum is a corruption of democracy

In a glass cabinet in the Acropolis Museum in Athens are some shaped stone pebbles that look like outsized buttons. They are almost 2,500 years old and testify to the world’s first experiment with democracy. Citizens (admittedly only men who met certain criteria) could vote on issues of the day by dropping their pebble into one of two urns, one for “yes”, the other for “no”. (An echo of that era is the word “psephology”, for the study of elections. The word was minted 60 years ago by an Oxford academic, drawing on the Greek word for pebble: “psephos”.)

This Sunday, Greeks will vote in a referendum which is much a corruption of democracy as their practice of voting two-and-a-half millennia ago was a noble innovation. This blog does not discuss the rival merits of Grexit or Greece staying in the euro but something that is, or should be, more fundamental: the operation of democracy. I have written before about the general dangers of referendums.

However, if they are to be held, certain rules are vital:

1. The choice must be clear

2. There must be enough time for rival campaigns to organise themselves and make their case

3. Those rival campaigns must have fair and, as far as possible, equal access to the electorate.

4. When the Government of the day seeks a particular outcome, it should not abuse its position (for example by taking sensitive decisions close to polling day, or dominating the airwaves).

Much of the early debate about Britain’s coming in-out referendum on the European Union has concerned the operation of these rules: the wording of the question on the ballot paper, campaign spending limits and the extent to which David Cameron and his ministers should go into policy-purdah in the final weeks. However, to list those rules is to show how outrageously Greece’s Prime Minister, Alexis Tsipiras, is behaving. The choice is not clear (would a “no” majority mean Grexit or not?), no time has been allowed for rival campaigns to organise, access to the electorate is completely lop-sided and Tsipiras seems determined to use his position to dominate debate.

These are not trivial issues. The European Union exists in large measure as a reaction against Europe’s 20th-century communist, fascist and Nazi tyrants—tyrants who frequently used perverted plebiscites to give their regimes the appearance of legitimacy. This weekend’s referendum in Greece looks more like one of those horrors than anything that can be truly called democratic. If this is how Greece is to take big decisions, then the real issue for the rest of our continent is not whether it should remain in the eurozone but whether it should be allowed to stay in the EU at all.