Thursday 22 October 2009

Ideas for politics in Venezuela

This will be a new part of the ideas for Venezuela.

We first need to be clear: Venezuela can have the best laws on Earth, can change the constitution for the n-th time and all, but if Venezuelans don't change their attitude towards society in general, towards REAL education and accountability, no political change is worth anything. Still, I think that the following ideas could be useful:

12.1 USE A PARLIAMENTARY SYSTEM

Most countries in America have presidential systems. These systems allow too much power to concentracte in one single pair of hands. They do not foster real debate. The president, specially in countries such as Venezuela now, are not made accountable to the congress. Now Venezuela is one of the few countries on Earth where there is no term limit for a president (and a president has many more powers than a prime minister or a queen in constitiutional monarchies). We need to have a parliamentary system. The German one may be one of the best right now: on one hand it promotes debate, accountability and proportional representation. On the other hand it guarantees that there is not too much fragmentation by introducing a 5% threshold of national votes for parties to be represented in parliament.

Here you can see the German chancellor talking in the Bundestag. She constantly has to answer very tough questions of the opposition and her own party there. Imagine the head of state of Venezuela doing that!




Let's join them! (but not the Ethiopean-Indian-Thai-Iraqi way)

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