Hacker News Reader

Comment by throw-nocoiner | Hacker News Reader

The way Sweden and Finland admission process unfolded makes a complete mockery of democracy

Rushed, decided behind closed doors, by a small clique of elites, without any semblance of democratic mandate, unconstitutional, no real public debate, no referendum, all in an atmosphere of McCarthy-like media frenzy. Any nuance is instantly brushed aside as Putin's propaganda

The polls put the support at ~52% in Sweden and ~61% in Finland. That means 48% and 39% of the people are neutral or against. This mass of people have no representation in mass media, and no major political party to back them. This void will be filled, probably by some outlier parties, possibly extremists. It's a recipe for a disaster

View on HN

Only 21% and 12% are against in Sweden and Finland, respectively, vs 57% and 76% who want to join.

I understand your point about fracturing politics on issues like this (we're still paying for "Brexit"), and that 10-20% is a fair chunk of voters, but even then, you've got to be really against it to throw your lot in with an extreme single-policy party. A minority of the minority will be disillusioned or angry about it.

Given that the vast balance of opinion wants to join, joining takes months and can be reversed, and both countries have general elections within the next 12 months, I think democracy will be just fine.

Finland and Sweden are parliamentary democracies. Officials are elected to carry out governmental processes. These people are trusted to serve the interests of the country. Not everything needs to be put to a vote of the people.

You lie, or have no idea what has been discussed in Finland for the past few months. The public has given a very clear mandate to join NATO ASAP.

Here's the latest poll news from 2022-05-09. "Yes" at 76%. https://yle.fi/news/3-12437506

And additional interesting bits, both the president have backed joining, and Sweden is joining NATO too: "A possible Swedish application for Nato membership would raise backing in Finland to 83 percent.

A clear position by the Finnish president and the government backing membership raise support by around the same margin, to 82 percent."

Meaning the support to join is overwhelmingly in majority.

It's done within the constitutional system in Finland and Sweden. The timing and the speed of process is a rational choice while Russian military is choking in Ukraine and is unable pose a serious military threat elsewhere right now. It's a window of opportunity and the wise leadership used it.

It's disingenious to only state the support percentage for polls that also have a significant amount of "don't know / don't care / undecided" answers. And the polls I've seen all had a pretty large amount of responses that were not directly opposed to joining NATO.

The most recent poll I've seen for Finland also has an even higher percentage of support for joining NATO now than your poll.

Not to mention, NATO can't accept any countries with an active border dispute, because it would immediately trigger Article 4. As a result, Russia has an established strategy of taking a slice of any country that considers joining NATO. It worked in both Georgia & Ukraine.

If you don't move quick, you won't move. This is the purpose of representative democracy - to allow trusted leaders to make decisions like this on your behalf.

And if you try to hold a referendum on joining NATO, Russia will be all over it like nobody's business. I'm glad that we decided to not have a referendum and considering how pro-NATO the opinion polling is, I'm not really worried for the death of democracy.

Referenda have always been double-edged swords. They’ve been using by totalitarian populists since at least the Roman republic.

In most representative democracies, treaties have to be approved after the fact but they certainly do not need to be pre-approved before being negotiated. This is not more undemocratic than a spur-of-the-moment referendum.

Trying to remember the last time a military defense treaty went up for referendum, anywhere.

But, if we look at Brexit and how much Russia (apparently) corrupted that vote, I can’t say I’m shocked that either country would choose not to subject themselves to such a process.

There's a general election in Sweden in September. If you are correct then I suppose the outcome of the election will show massive losses for the parties that stand behind this decision and so democracy will win.

In any case, pulling out of NATO is a possibility, should the country have second thoughts or the situation change in the future.

I recommend you read about "representative democracy". This is fine. Elected officials make decisions - not the electorate.

Is it?

In a non-democracy, the dictator decides whatever they what.

These are democracies, and so people elected their representatives, and the representatives decided to join NATO. I lived in Sweden for many years, and it seems like the general population indeed supports it. No law says you have to go a referendum, and it's definitely not against the constitution. The fact it was a quick decision is a actually great IMHO - people often see democracies as slow to respond, and here you have two countries moving a democratic process relatively quickly.

HN to me is a enigma. I see comments on here a lot lamenting simple majorities for presidential elections being a necessary for a “democracy”, and now comments describing simple majorities being un-democractic.

I am not making a comment that either is good or bad, just it seems that what “democracy” means tends to be pretty damned subjective.

> I see comments on here a lot lamenting simple majorities for presidential elections being a necessary for a “democracy”, and now comments describing simple majorities being un-democractic.

It might also be that both sets do not overlap much. Nerds have always had strange opinions about what democracy is.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com