Referendums…not referenda

There was an interesting couple of referendum results this weekend just gone.

Firstly the Hungarians voted on whether they were happy with the EU refugee policy regarding countries taking their share. Then the Columbians are trying for peace after about 53 years of civil war where over 220,000 people have been killed.

Strangely, it would appear that the winner in both of these referendums is apathy. It seems that the majority of the voting population in both of these countries don’t care either way. I find this quite odd in the Columbian referendum when it is in order to end a 53 year civil war which has seen the deaths of so many innocent people.

The percentage of the population voting in these two referendums were 43.9% in Hungary and an extraordinary 38% in Columbia. 38%!

Mind you, that’s not the lowest turnout I’ve found with just a quick search online. That honour goes to a Bulgarian referendum held in 2013 when the electorate was asked if they wanted a new nuclear power station built. The actual voting seemed to indicate that a lot of people wanted it to go ahead (61.49% said yes) but, unfortunately for them, there wasn’t enough votes cast for it to count. The Bulgarian constitution dictates that a referendum needs to have at least 60% turn out of voters to count. I guess most of the voting population in Bulgaria really don’t care about nuclear power because only 20.22% of the population turned up.

In real numbers that means approximately 1.5 million people were making a decision for 7 million people. That makes around 5.5 million apathetic people*.

Is the reason for these figures one of a failure of democracy or a sort of lounge chair comfort whereby the majority of people are happy to just sit and watch the world go by. They either trust the government (or not) and don’t want to be dragged out of their chair to give their opinion. Or maybe they don’t actually have an opinion. Mind you, Bulgaria has only been a democracy since 1989 so maybe they’re not used to it yet.

One more referendum that really surprised me was the one held in Greece in 2015, asking the population if they wanted to accept the EU bailout proposal. In the news here in the UK we heard about how the Greeks were up in arms about the bailout and how they wouldn’t stand for it. There was a certainty that the whole of Greece would vote against it.

Well, Greece did (sort of) vote against it. 61.31% said no. That seems pretty definite to me…except it was only from 62.5% of the population. Okay, that seems a lot more indicative than the crazy Bulgarians however, given the importance of the decision and given the fact that we non-Greeks thought there would be a massive turn out, it’s extraordinary. Add to that the fact that Greece was the birth place of what we think of as democracy and the whole thing seems to say something very different.

Are we all tired and bored with democracy? Would we rather be led by a single, unelected body which happily does whatever it considers is good for us? I know I don’t but if the majority wants it, I guess democracy demands that it’s what we all want.

* These figures come from countrymeters.com and are applied with a broad brush. They do not allow for voting age for a start. Even so, the figures are close enough to make my point!