Have you ever seen a parliamentarian or a politician walking to work? or taking public transportation? or staying in line for a doctor to see them? Probably you can name a few, but just the exceptions. I believe you have never saw the whole 650 members of the House of the Commons of the UK walking to work in early morning, or the 709 members of the Germany Bundestag taking common transportation to work, or the 588 Romanian parliamentarians and the 560 Poland parliamentarians taking the subway to work.
Although today it has become normal for parliamentarians and governors to have a salary high enough not to stand in line at the store to pay for products purchased, not to sit in crowds on public transport and so on, we must understand that this cannot be of any use to us, to the people who are to be represented by them.
We have gone through countless pandemics and health problems, so that after decades no public hospital to be built and no real work to be made for improving the public services and defending our interests. Evidence in this direction can be seen by looking at the number of hospitals for example in Germany in the last two decades the number of hospitals has decreased from 2.242 in 2000 to 1.925 in 2018. Or the number of hospital beds in the UK for example, which in 2000 were 240.000 beds comparing to 163.873 in 2019. Or Romanian hospitals from 348 hospitals in 2000 to 316 in 2020.
In the context when in the 2000’s we have had the H5N1 virus (bird flu) than in 2009 the H1N1 virus (swine flu), the Coronavirus since 2012, Ebola between 2013-2016, Zika virus and many other deseases that triggered epidemics or even pandemics the number of our hospitals is decreasing.
Then, in the last 16 years in Romania have been closed up to 21.000 educational units, around 4 schools are closed every day. According to a World Bank report during this period in Romania have been closed 25% of its educational units with legal personality and 17% of satellite education units. Some could say there was a lack of funds. But on the contrary between 2014 and 2020 the EU has allocated arrond 350 millions of euros from the Regional Development Fund so Romania could develop the educational infrastructure. Still we got less and less schools.
In the UK is not good either, the statistics show that the number of secondary schools have decreased from 4.352 in 2000 to 4.188 in 2018.
These statistics keep the trend in other areas as well as in other countries. So we ask ourselves: in a world where we have come to have more money, higher salaries, larger state budgets, technology and much more of everything, how have we come to have fewer hospitals, fewer schools, about the same transportation system, always crowded and still not adapted to the ecological norms? In which measure the political body represents us?
For politicians to be able to represent the people, they must be aware of the problems and needs that citizens have, be part of the affected system and not live different realities. In this context, the major problem that led to the creation of this great rupture in representation is the separation of politicians from social reality. From the moment they become politicians, they are given a lot of benefits that contribute to building another life, one in which they no longer travel by train for tens of hours to a location but take the plane, or do not feel the problems of public transport because the last time they were on public transport was 15-20 years ago, they don’t know about poverty because, although there are commissions that do research in this direction, there were not too many ministers to go in person through villages and poor areas to see the problems themselves.
From the moment politicians reach the decision-making structures of the state, they live a completely different life, and their activity does not intersect too much with what we face in our daily life so they could represent us. Many of them even want to become politicians in order to get rid of social problems and not to reform the system. This becomes obvious if we look at the statistics presented above. It is very clear that politicians are torn from social reality and that they do not represent society as well as we hope.
The problem of representation is thousands of years old; it is not now the first time when a country leader or a political or religious leader had a much better life than that of his people. Although the people have tolerated this for enough time out of gratitude and a desire for them to solve their problems, I wonder how long these things will be tolerated and how do we expect them to solve our problems if we display the politician jobs as ideals of life and perfect trades for a better life not as jobs where politicians are in the service of the people as they should be?
This gap of representation can be solved through social involvement, voting, by creating new representation structures, changing the duties that politicians must have, establishing rules to guarantee the politicians work and clear results in front of the people at the end of their mandate. We need a reformulation of the system because we cannot leave things like this in the context in which we are moving from one pandemic to another and the number of hospitals decreases, we cannot believe their words about a better life in the context in which the schools are closed and we have no way to teach our children to build a better life.
There is one case of representation that inspires, the President of Uruguay, Jose Mujica that had the salary in line with the average income of Uruguay, 775 dollars a month, and donated 90% of them to charity, that has a normal life like his people and blames the politicians of the world for their obsession on consumption which leads us to the end of the world.
In this context I live you with a question: Who could better represent us, a man who lives like us and has the same problems we have (breaths the same polluted air, walks on the same roads full of garbage, bathe in the same plastic-filled waters, not in the Maldives, Bora Bora or Bahamas, eat foods like us with chemicals added to them, stay in the same road to the hospital to treat the problems appeared from all this mess) or one who lives like in fairy tales? It is your decision what you do, but know that the vote and communication is your power in this direction. The more you talk with those around you about this gap of representation, the more the vote will change the world we live in.
Sources:
- Chen G. (2020). How many politicians send their kids to public schools? Public Schools Review.
- Clark D. (2019). United Kingdom (UK): Number of secondary schools 2000-2019. Statista.
- Cotidianul.ro (2010, 08 02). In Romania sunt 18.300 de biserici si doar 425 de spitale. Retrieved 10 15, 2020, from cotidianul.ro: https://www.cotidianul.ro/in-romania-sunt-18-300-de-biserici-si-doar-425-de-spitale/
- Degenhard J. (2020). Hospital count forecast in Romania 2010-2025. Statista.
- European Commission. (2019). Monitorul Educatiei si formarii 2019. Bucharest: Comisia Europeana.
- Hernandez V. (2012). Jose Mujica: The world’s ‘poorest’ president. BBC.
- Koptyug E. (2020). Number of hospitals in Germany 2000-2018. Statista.
- Stewart C. (2020). Number of hospital beds in the United Kingdom. Statista.