In a democracy who is sovereign

This holds a forteriori for the question of democratic legitimacy. The emergency powers exercised at the federal and state levels can only be justified with reference to averting imminent catastrophe.

It is, however, a behavioralist misunderstanding to think that it is possible to legitimize the current measures simply through the support of the population as measured in opinion polls.

Zur Lage der Demokratie in Deutschland, Springer Here, the principle of proportionality comes into play. Specifically, this means: the massive restriction of basic rights has to be appropriate, necessary, and proportionate. Is this the case? It is certainly not proportionate if one looks only at the number of infections and deaths in Germany. If this were the case, the restrictions of basic rights would have been necessary during the influenza outbreak in the winter of with over 25, deaths.

The fundamental restrictions are proportionate only if one looks at them from the perspective of an imminent worst-case scenario with tens of thousands of deaths. This has not been ruled out by virologists and epidemiologists. Only this kind of expectation of looming catastrophe would make it possible to justify the current emergency measures. Yet it is not science that can decide this question.

Science cannot be seen as a fourth order sovereign, although all friends of expertocratic governance have a preference for. Science has epistemic, but not democratic legitimacy. The executive alone cannot take on this role of decision-maker for an extended period. The longer the restriction of basic rights goes on, the more the second-order sovereign, the parliament, has to come back into the picture.

If this does not happen, norm-based representative democracy is in danger of lurching into naked decisionism. Germany is not Hungary, Merkel not Orban. But German Democracy too, is by no means fully immune to slow de-parliamentarization and de-liberalization of its way of governance. Wolfgang Merkel is Professor Emeritus and the former director of the Democracy and Democratization research unit.

Corona and the strong state - How immune is democracy? This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4. Filimon Peonidis is associate professor of moral and political philosophy and head of the graduate philosophy program at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Preface Chapter 1: Democracy as Popular Sovereignty 1. Chapter 2: The Institutions of Popular Sovereignty 2. This book combines erudite knowledge about the classics in democratic thought with a thorough analysis of contemporary literature.

And it establishes the philosophical moral grounds of, as well as the basics of the institutional design for, a demanding ideal of direct democracy. Democracy means, for Peonidis, simply popular sovereignty, the government by the people.

And this gives him a powerful instrument to criticize the present representative democracies for being too elitist, and therefore insufficiently legitimate.

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