"Better a freedom full of dangers than a quiet slavery"

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract

"The Law is that free decision, which with the consent of the whole people was made"

Rigas Feraios, The Rights of Man

It is completely normal that the exercise of the right to vote once every few years, with the purpose of choosing persons to exercise central state power and not choosing policies to implement, creates an essentially unbridgeable distance between the represented and the representatives, which leads to the "representation gap", which in turn is perceived as a "democratic deficit". The adoption of more direct democratic procedures and systems, which will involve citizens much more actively in the exercise of power, is sometimes proposed as a solution. In this text, we attempt to address the most basic concerns regarding this key issue, focusing on the corresponding political proposal and at the same time exploring the future prospects of Democracy, as a way of political formation and governance of organized societies, at a time when these prospects do not seem to be a given at all.