It is not: https://danielpocock.com/what-does-democracy-mean-in-free-so...

The current Debian "developers" have reached uniform agreed that:

1) Neither of them will participate in election

2) People outside of "developer" circle (including major contributors, who do most of actual work on Debian) can't participate in election

The whole "crisis" is artificially created. Not like that matters, — most of decision making is already done by corporate employees, not some fictitious "community leader".