[saiya-jin]

There is at least 1 place where it works in some extent for 800 years - Switzerland. Public votes few times every year on basically anything enough people decide to vote on (100k signatures needed in 8m population and you have a public vote). You want to ban mosques, or join Nato or have 6 weeks of paid vacation? Have a say. Also weak central government, and strong cantonal ones with their own rules and laws. THAT is true freedom in the hands of people, to decide on your lives, to have freedom to improve it or mess it up.

Every effin' politician knows it, yet they conveniently ignore it, or even outright attack it when they are spewing words like freedom and democracy. It doesnt matter if EU or US or any other place.

[Broken_Hippo]

As another poster pointed out: Swiss women couldn't vote in national elections until 1991. Democracy isn't a perfect system, it is just that having a system with some democracy in it is the best we've come up with so far.

Any minority will never truly have a say. It doesn't matter if you can vote if you don't have enough numbers to make a difference. Your best bet would be that folks tire of voting on these - but that's only if you can get enough signatures. Hope you can work and get signatures at the same time and that you aren't in too poor health to do this.

It isn't 'freedom', it is just another way to be tyrannical and claim there is "freedom". It isn't like folks born in a country/region can just move somewhere else. Heck, folks fleeing actual war have some issues with this.

[herbst]

This so much. It works for us and there is no reason it wouldn't work for others.

Politicians here have a completely different role in society. They ain't hero's, they ain't badman's the are just smart people doing their democratic jobs.

And society talks about concrete topics and not politicians.

[hulitu]

It is not working there also. See the Covid vaccine theater.