Critics of "Sovereign Democracy"
According to the Washington Post, the term "sovereign democracy" conveys that "Russia's regime is democratic and, second, that this claim must be accepted without demanding any proof, period. Any attempt at verification will be regarded as unfriendly and as meddling in Russia's domestic affairs." Yuri Semyonov has written:
The concept of sovereignty relates to government as a whole, and not to a certain form of rule or to a political regime. Democracy can be direct or representative, real (which has never actually existed in the human history), formal (as in antiquity, or the modern Western countries), or a fiction (as in the USSR and other so-called socialist countries).
Criticizing the term in an interview for "Expert", Dmitry Medvedev pointed out that sovereignty and democracy are from different conceptual categories and fusing them is impossible. "If you take the word 'democracy' and start attaching qualifiers to it that would seem a little odd. It would lead one to think that we're talking about some other, non-traditional type of democracy."
On the 19th July, 2006, Mikhail Gorbachev criticized the cancellation of elections in single-member constituencies as well as the raising of barriers for participation in the Duma to 7%. He remarked that "these innovations into legislation cannot be justified by theories of 'sovereign' or 'managed' democracy. Limitations that may be found to be necessary when the very existence of the government and its citizens may be threatened must be looked upon as temporary, and not elevated into principles, like is done by the theorists of 'sovereign' and 'managed' democracy. These kinds of definitions distort the essence of democracy, just like the concepts of 'socialist' and 'people's' democracy before them".
Whilst talking about sovereign democracy Mikhail Kasyanov pointed out that "... the aims of this doctrine are quite clear: the concentration and holding of political power and property at any cost. The consequences of this are already evident, including the glorification of populism, the steady destruction of private and public institutions and the departure from the principals of the law, democracy, and the free market."
Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Daniel Fried has stated in an interview that
I get nervous when people put labels in front of democracy. Sovereign democracy, managed democracy, people's democracy, socialist democracy, Aryan democracy, Islamic democracy - I am not a big fan of adjectives. Managed democracy doesn't sound like democracy. Sovereign democracy strikes me as meaningless."
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