Yesterday was a very bad day for Democracy

The EU has an estimated population of 499,794,855.

Last night 27 people voted for a new president. That's 0.0000054% of the population. That's not very democratic.

Well, how about we look at all the votes those 27 people have received when they were elected. Let's assume that we voted for them to make this choice (*cough* bullshit *cough*) and see how many of us chose them.

I've tried to get the best view possible of the number of people in each country who directly elected each leader (So, Gordon Brown was elected by 24,278 people, whereas Sarkozy was the first choice for 11,48,663 people).

In countries where the leader is merely the leader of the biggest party, I've taken the total number of votes for that party at the latest elections (which should massively overstate the actual number who directly voted for that character).

The details are at the bottom of this post. However, we can see that the 27 leaders of the EU, between them have the (roughly) direct support of 81,408,743 people. That feels pretty big. However, it corresponds to 16.3% of the total population. That's right, less than one in six of the EU even voted for the person who voted for our new President. Jan Fischer in the Czech Republic wasn't even elected, before becoming PM he was the head of the Czech Statistical Office.

We now have a democracy where the leaders of the EU between them are only directly supported by 16% of the population (and even if you included everyone who voted for Labour in the UK, you're still looking at a percentage of less than 20%).

If they had wanted to be democratic why not have an election? We're now in the terrifying situation where our politicians (with a mandate of less than one in six) are deciding who is going to be ruling us.

Yesterday was a very bad day for Democracy.