tisdag 25 maj 2010

A Happy Republic without a Head of State

Original poster for French movie Ridicule by Patrice Leconte 1996.

There is a French movie from the 1990s called Ridicule, by director Patrice Leconte. The story plot is basically that an engineer from Northern France goes to Paris, in order to get a permit and funding to drain a swamp and this way develop the area economically. He spends an awful lot of time envolving in absurd practices at the court of Louis XVI. Nothing of what he is forced to do att court has anything to do with the real purpose of his stay there. That is the absurdity of the whole situation.
Similarly, we poor Swedes nowadays has to watch the feudal rites of our head of state and his family preparing for the wedding of their oldest daughter. As Sweden is a monarchy, the head of state is selected by a kind of breeding process. Sorry to say that makes the so called blue-blooded royality all the more degenerated as time passes by. To be polite - they do not represent the intelligencia of the country. The process seems to bring the least fit to the job. Therefore the process itself is a failure!
So howcome we do proceed in this clear folly? Why do Swedish tax-payers have to pay for the up-coming wedding? How can the Prime Minister give away state property to the newly married? The Haga castle is in the process becoming a restricted area where ordinary Swedes may no longer walk freely, instead the newly married will dwell there behind barbed wire and security guards. To my recollection there is a Swedish law which says that it is illegal to give away state property...

Louis XVI executed at Place de la Révolution 1793, in Paris.

To return to Patrice Leconte's masterpiece Ridicule, the problem that the engineer met at court was neatly solved by the French Revulotion, occuring just a decade later. We, the Swedish people, have the chance to get rid of this ridiculous and sorry excuse for a head of state once and for all. We had the chance in 1848, 1870, 1914 and in the 1970s, but we missed it. Don't miss it again!
A Swedish political scientist proposed, a couple of months ago, that it would be rather easy to turn Sweden into a republic. The simple solution would be to abolish to head of state position right now and replace it with... nothing. As citizen CG Bernadotte does close to nothing constitutionally, it would be very easy to hand over those redundant tasks to the Prime Minister and the Speaker of the Parliament. And we have a constitutional innovation, replacing the political dinosaur of monarchy!
Why wait? It is like facing a necessary surgical operation, if you wait it only gets worse!


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