[panick21_]

I can only say from the Swiss perspective, critical system and service are not degraded and the system would work perfectly fine without a few 10000 civil service works. And I don't think this is true for Austria either.

> Yes, democracy is about getting the people's vote of confidence. How you earn that confidence is outside the democratic process and could be as simple as "feed them BS".

In Switzerland getting people vote is about much more then confidence as we vote regularly on actual issues, not just on people or parties. And because its Concordance system all parties share a certain amount of confidence form the population.

The political discussion about mandatory military services are certainly happening and have been for a very long time. Generally, in a conservative society you need to have a really convincing reason to change something, and in Switzerland at least nobody has come up with a great alternative that convinces many people so the system stays as it it.