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Comment by iLoveOncall | Hacker News Reader

The entire population was able to vote to elect the party, and the party then elected her as PM. Her position was 100% legitimate, whether you like it or not.

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It would be a reasonable comment if Conservative MP's - who are elected by voters - had chosen her. However, Rishi Sunak was their choice. Instead she was chosen by a bit more than 100k members.

Although legally fine, there certainly is some lack of legitimacy when PMs are elected by party members after the predecessor is axed, because the voters never had a chance to assess the person they end up with (in this role).

The larger issue is that the new Tories' procedure for producing candidates leads to a winner that has a large majority of parliament against her.

There is now a problematic mixture of parliamentary and Tory voter legitimization. That would be resolved by a true general election.

Legitimate only means that the :rules: were followed and nothing more. It does not mean that the rules or the system they reside in are just.

I never claimed otherwise. I just answered to the comment stating that she was illigetimally in her position, as if the UK was a dictatorship, which isn't the case.

I think that there is a bit more nuance needed if you claim 100% legitimacy.

Winning an election on one manifesto, being chosen by 100k members, and then ripping the manifesto up and trying to implement a set of completely different policies would strike most, I think, as not 100% legitimate even if it's legal.

And just to add that she campaigned with members on ripping up the manifesto.

The word legitimacy can be interpreted in either a normative way or a “positive” (see positivism) way. The first meaning refers to political philosophy and deals with questions such as: What are the right sources of legitimacy? Is a specific political order or regime worthy of recognition? As such, legitimacy is a classic topic of political philosophy.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/legitimacy

While I agree with you that it would be incorrect to baldly dismiss Truss' premiership as illegitimate, I feel that uniqueuid's comment was using the term according to the above usage, suggesting, perhaps, that the law of the land is anachronistic, or less than optimal according to democratic principles.

Not the only meaning of "legitimate". There's also "Authentic, real, genuine" and "Conforming to known principles, or established or accepted rules or standards; valid." (Wiktionary) There's a question of acceptability involved here, I feel.

Being considered legitimate according to a flawed system doesn't mean the system isn't flawed.

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