Share
Natan Sharansky, chairman of the Executive of the Jewish Agency and author of The Case for Democracy, writes that, in response to recent Egyptian elections, Western support for democracy in Egypt should focus on a free civil society and not a policy that considers Egyptian democracy's end as "already in sight."
"Nothing is instantaneous in politics. To think of elections as a panacea, let alone a sure road to real democracy, is to evince a failure of historical imagination. The proper role of the free world is not to encourage or to stop elections. Its role should be to formulate, and to stick by, a policy of incremental change based on creating the institutions that will lead ineluctably to pressure for more and more representative forms of government."
