Political action aimed at disqualifying political adversaries through concocted charges is glaringly misguided in a democracy. This behavior substitutes adjudicated competition for intimidation and defies the very concept of an election as the appropriate way to select leadership.
A democracy has only one rule when it comes to power: power must be given to politicians, not taken from them. If politicians play at eliminating their competition at strategic moments through spurious complaints, then democracy endangers the contest between politicians and seeks only surprise at the polls. Politicians treating democracy the way they would treat any other institution undermines the legal system when the legal system should protect democracy, rendering democracy a mere formality.
But the effects of this process do not merely stop with the affected candidates. This is the kind of thing that conditions society to accept this kind of exclusion as the norm for the next generation of aspiring politicians: that the hallmark of survival is to be aggressively legal, that the best candidates are eliminated from the race before the election is ever held.
Furthermore, there is a problem that affects institutions that should remain neutral. For instance, courts and prosecution agencies are now involved in political disputes and find themselves under pressure to serve political interests. As soon as such agencies and institutions are associated with a political interest in a society or a nation, the law suffers and is hard to uphold.
The answer is to strengthen protections for electoral competition: rigorous review of disqualification claims, stringent safeguards against spurious complaints, and severe sanctions for those who seek to abuse the legal process for political purposes. More significantly, political leaders and institutions must ensure that elections, not disqualification, are the proper forum for resolving claims to leadership. Democracy’s choice should remain credible and decisive.
