The position of the super-rich towards democracy is very clear; as Wolfgang Schäuble is reported to have articulated: “elections cannot be allowed to change economic policies”
Former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis, who was in attendance when Schäuble expressed this position, has sarcastically suggested that elections should, therefore, be banned in debtor nations; that democracy should be the exclusive privilege of creditor countries. But his joke presupposes that this is not already practically the case. The truth is, this is exactly the situation for poor countries; for countries indebted to the World Bank, the IMF, and so on. Elections, democracy, do not have any impact on economic policy, and by extension, on any other policy affected by economics (which is everything). Elections may not be banned, but they are politically and economically pointless. They are of no value except as mechanisms for managing the population’s aspirations, expectations, and frustrations.
In poor countries, democracy is the opiate of the masses.