Incidentally, the incoming president of Brazil is also an ex-con.
The incoming president of Brazil had his convictions thrown out because the process was fraudulent. IIRC election regulators went after Bolsanaro for calling Lula an ex-con.
That aside, I don't think enough people explicitly hold popular sovereignty (expressed as democracy) over the rule of law. Law that isn't subject to popular sovereignty is obviously subject to some other kind of soverign. You shouldn't be jailing people who have a reasonable chance of being elected as the head of the executive, because if the public would elect them, the public doesn't think that they should be jailed.
A better argument is that it is a check/balance against laws that are not democratic putting people in prison that provide a good opposition the current president.
Honestly I the existing and proposed age limits (e.g. that you can't serve as President over 80) are addressing symptoms of a deeper problem. If your country's population wants to elect a senile 90 year-old or dumb 18 year-old or Russian traitor, your democracy is deeply flawed. A law preventing the people from doing so won't save them, as they can just elect someone else incompetent. If voters know what they're doing we shouldn't need requirements for people to run for office.
The Chamber of Commerce tried earlier to specifically institute a term limit for FDR, but it didn't work out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot
The current democracy-worship afoot in the US ignores the fact that almost every progressive aspect of the US state sprang from a counter-majoritarian institution: Roe and Brown, plus the administrative implementation of civil rights law.
Writing the law may be part of the popularity contest, but upholding the law most certainly is not.
Then they're democratic in name only. If the previous leader has the effective, practical ability to fuck with the transfer of power, it ain't democracy.
Nothing about that should stop them from running and winning. But running and/or winning shouldn't get them out either.
Then you're disenfranchising the majority of democratic voters, millions of citizens, in preference of ossifying so-called criminal justice against a mere one human. Why would you do that? What hallowed value does that serve?
The question of what's a crime and what's valid is a democratic question fundamentally, and is and should be mutable.
We're in this thread, remember, because pretentious ideologues once imprisoned an anti-war protestor for bullshit reasons that were framed as "crimes".
Sure, and the question of the legality of a given action can also be on the ballot. Implying that someone who wins an election should automatically get out of jail is nonsense. One of the pillars of the bureaucratic rule of law is making it so that no individual has autocratic power. We already have too much of powerful politicians and other agents of the state being effectively above the law.
If anything, to me, "convicted criminal winning an election by majority vote" strongly pattern-matches "effective check against autocracy". Again: look at what the OP is, what fact patterns we're discussing in this thread!
No it's not. The two concepts are orthogonal, and treating them as a single quality is a dangerous fallacy. The first is about how someone gets elected to an office - one of the cornerstones of our society is that leaders are elected by the people. The second is what someone in an office can legally do once they are there - another cornerstone is that nobody is above the rule of law. Equating the two effectively throws out the latter.
The distinction is very clear when it comes to a narrowly-scoped office, or even a general executive at a low level like the mayor of a city. It only gets fuzzier as you go up in scale, as those charged with enforcing the law are better poised to not enforce against themselves. But the proper term for that is "corruption".
It seems pretty clearly undemocratic to me to say that you get out of jail if you win an election (or that the justice system somehow applies less to you if you’re an elected official).
Democracy is root.
Of course, the UK is a monarchy, not a republic, so its relevance to the subject at hand is somewhat dubious.
This is a common claim, but I can't say that I agree. The House of Lords holds real power, as does the king in his role as head of state. The UK is not an absolute monarchy by any means, but the king is far more than just a figurehead [1].
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/feb/07/how-archaic-...