That everybody has an equal say, and all interests are taken into account.
Of course I am happy that Operation Libero [2] was able to overcome the Swiss right populists repeatedly. The basic problem however is not solved. Some decades back. the left wind was leading because of clever campaigning. Then came some people around a right wing billionaire who copied the successful elements of the lefties’ campaign style, and they began to win elections and to set the political agenda. Nowadays, Operation Libero is obviously running more efficient campaigns. But the populists are learning from this example, as their recent and much less aggressive campaign clearly shows.
This way we reduce democracy to a competition between campaign teams: Who is able to hire the better one? As things stand now, I would not be to sure that liberals will win on the long run, let alone left wingers.
For some years already I feel that we have to reinvent democracy to save its core principles: That all persons have an equal say in order to make sure that all interest are taken into account proportionally when deciding. Neither the representative parliamentary model nor the so-called democracy have proven be to immune to populist attacks by rich people.
Already Hitler knew and demonstrated that democracy in its actually existing versions can be abolished using its proper instruments. I advocate to develop a democratic decision-making based on electing the local council at random out of the register of local residents, including children, old people, poor people, immigrants [3], and combining it with the ‚Rätedemokratie‘ (the democracy based on soviets) for all subsequent levels of representation. Thus, abuse and control of the bottom-up councils by a top-down party (as did the Bolsheviks with the Soviets) could be inhibited, and at the same time the different groups of the society would be represented in such councils according to their effective size, thus women would constitute a slight majority whereas the percentage of lawyers, functionaries, farmers, etc. would be reduced considerably — and fortunately.
References:
[1] First published on Facebook
[2] Flavia Kleiner: ‚Switzerland has been a lab for toxic rightwing politics. We took that on.‘ (With thank to Marcy Goldberg for the link.)
[3] There are ancient and still valid arguments for election by lot, see David Bridle (2022): ‚Ways of being‘, chapter ‚Getting Random‘