You could say this for pretty much every important decision in every democracy ever. It's seldom things get settled with percentage support starting with anything other than a 5.
I am still stunned that Brexit was left to a 50% + epsilon referendum.
It's likely that majority support would have evaporated as soon as any leave deal was reached. No deal would have satisfied all the different reasons people voted leave.
Only Johnson was able to cut that Gordion Knot, albeit by lying to people to their face.
To be fair, Parliament forced a delay from Oct 2019 to Jan 2020, to ensure that there was some sort of agreement in place. And then it passed because there was a one-year transitionary period until Jan 2021 during which the UK stayed in the single market.
And now we've voted in a PM who promises building closer ties with the EU. And eventually the generation that rabidly voted to leave will disappear. Progress marches on slowly.
In the end we had an opportunity to reverse it, in 2017 and 2019, but said “no”
In Australia, a constitutional referendum requires a double majority to pass: both a majority nationally, and a state-wide majority in a majority of states (so at least 4 out of 6).
Unlike Australia, the UK has no written constitution, and is a unitary state with devolution instead of a federation. Still, Brexit was undeniably a constitutional-level issue, and taking the constituent countries as the analog to states, they could have adopted the same "double majority" rule in the UK for the Brexit referendum. And if they had, the referendum would have failed: it got a majority nationwide, but in only two out of four constituent countries (England and Wales but not Scotland and Northern Ireland).
A big problem the UK has – which Brexit has arguably only worsened – is its extreme lopsidedness – one of the constituent countries (England) is over 80% of the population, so a big enough English majority on any issue can override the will of the other three constituent countries. And yet there are essentially no constitutional provisions to protect against this. Adopting a "double majority" for the Brexit referendum would have been a small step in the direction of doing so, at least by establishing a precedent.
[0] The fact that it was legally non-binding is not an issue: the legislation could have simply specified the conditions under which the referendum would be "deemed to pass", and require some appropriate government official to make a formal declaration as to whether those conditions had been met or not.
requiring a double majority to leave would the definition of stacking the deck in your favour
In 1973, the UK was much closer to a pure unitary state – there was no Scottish Parliament, no Welsh Parliament; the existing devolution in Northern Ireland (the Parliament of Northern Ireland) had just been abolished the previous year and the attempts to reinstate it in 1974 and 1982 proved to be short-lived failures. By 2016 there was a devolved Scottish Parliament, a devolved Welsh Assembly (designated a Parliament in 2020), and a devolved Northern Ireland assembly.
I think the evolution of devolution (pardon the pun) is a recognition that the UK needed stronger protections for Scottish/Welsh/Northern Irish rights against the English supermajority, and a "double majority" for constitutional-level national referendums would be a step further in that direction.
The UK joined the EEC, a very different institution
It seems like democracy really is an experiment representative of our hope of human cooperation, and yet I'm constantly reminded that the way we actually implement and enact is very far from that ideal.
> Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?
There was nothing about what should happen if "leave" won.
The referendum should have been for the UK to prepare a detailed plan for leaving the Union and then have a referendum on whether or not to implement that plan.
A simple question for a massively complex problem.
An "advisory" referendum that was guaranteed to be treated as legally binding (will of the people and all that).
Being advisory meant that it avoided what laws there were on referendum, like being able to disenfranchise UK expats of which there were a lot in the EU. Maybe this also allowed it to be a simple 50.1% majority as well, I forget.
Dominic Cummings and Vote Leave rang rings around everyone and got the result they wanted.
Politics is the art of the possible. The referendum was a once-in-a-generation chance to leave, voting for it was smart. If remain had won there's no way we would have left on any terms, nor reformed our relationship with the EU at all; quite the contrary.
https://policyexchange.org.uk/blogs/brics-and-the-commonweal...
It was in the question: leaving the EU. Leaving was what happened, and it wasn't particularly mysterious or complex.
> The referendum should have been for the UK to prepare a detailed plan for leaving the Union and then have a referendum on whether or not to implement that plan.
So they could rig the second? No, the EU wouldn't have agreed to any negotiations of the form "we might do it or we might not", and it would simply have pushed them to play even more hardball than they did (which in the end turned out to involve a lot of bluffing, many of their supposed red lines were crossed after the UK actually left).
Which would annoy the Brexitters that would like to defend vague remain instead of getting into the weeds, or just try to sell their own version of Brexit when it may end up being another version in the end. And the people who oppose voting reform. And I get the feeling the result would be remain wins by being the compromise second preference of a lot of voters.
You can play games with re-running things forever to try and get a Remain win, but the entire reason the referendum was run that way was an attempt to get a Remain win. That's why it was presented as an all-or-nothing vote when basically all the Eurosceptics who had been pushing for a referendum wanted something less than fully leaving to be on the menu (mostly a pile of reforms and much less distance/opting out of any future treaty changes/the ECJ/etc). Cameron specifically set it up as Leave/Remain because he thought nobody could countenance fully leaving and it would force a Remain (unreformed) victory. Obviously he was wrong.
Those opt ours were enshrined in the treaties. There was no way to rescind them without the consent of the UK. You’re constructing a straw man.
People were pretty ill informed and voted leave for reasons like they were pissed off with the present situation, or they didn't like foreigners.
Which they were entitled to do but have ended up with a worse situation and worse foreigners.
The problem with not proceeding following a "50% + epsilon" is you're then suddenly ignoring the majority of the electorate which has its own political backlash.
The trick is to not have a referendum unless the outcome likely to be definitive. This is actually codified in the Good Friday agreement as a condition for the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland to call an Irish unification referendum.
The referendum should have been two part. 1 want to leave or not? 2 how about this specific option (channel) or shall we forget the it all?
Why single out Hungary and Poland specifically? Is it worse than when Austria, Netherlands, France, etc. have a different opinion to the rest of the union and torpedo progress just to pander to the right wingers in their country?
Democracies in Europe. Hungary is at the lower end of the spectrum.
The removal of the former Polish government was largely driven by public disapproval of state fund mismanagement. In Hungary, a key element of the current government's platform appears to be the promotion of national identity, including ties with diaspora communities formed after WWI (The Treaty of Trianon), potentially with implications for future "geopolitical alignments" (the likelihood of which is debatable).
These results, while influenced by the d'Hondt system, reflect the sentiment of the voting population, which is a democratic process, in principle. The ruling methods are not 100% democratic though (rule of majority with respect for minority rights)
However, the opinions of my "more Western friends" on those topics "diverge from on-the-ground realities".
"Public" TV had literal North Korea level of propaganda too.
Even the (useless and bad) SMS service used to warn about bad weather... send out texts to remind old people to vote.
That's hilarious (not), given that so much discourse is about just how much democracy should be shaved off to get the desirable Democratic(tm) results (Supermajority for Brexit! Ban AFD! et al.).
We have long known that unanimity holds us back internationally, and that the switch to majority vote is way overdue - but leading European Union member states to accept that is going to be a long slog. We'll get there and we have started on the path: trade policy for example is already qualified majority voting.
The Qualified Majority Vote has been being used in increasing scope of policy areas for many years.
QMV was part of stuff from the 1986 SEA, and got a major boost in the 1992 Maastricht Treaty, since it was recognised as practically being necessary to make any progress towards (and within) the Single Market.
In practice most decisions are still technically unanimous, because it looks better politically and it doesn't cost anything more (since a majority can simply pass whatever they want, they are not forced to concede anything to the obstructionists; with the newer rules, it's smarter for any isolated bloc to immediately trade any publicly-stated opposition for any minor favour they can get).
This is the reason why Orban, despite all his bombast, has no influence whatsoever on the actual decisions; but also why German resistance against overdue fiscal reforms has basically melted.