Politics & Power Quote by Tahar Ben Jelloun

Democracy, in Tahar Ben Jelloun's phrasing, isn’t a saintly ideal; it’s a recurring appointment with conflict. Calling elections a "national consultation" sounds almost clinical, like a civic checkup. That calm wording is the trick: it recasts the noisy, ego-driven scramble for office as something a country must do to stay politically alive. The subtext is both pragmatic and faintly skeptical. People "representing different programmes" suggests pluralism, but the line also implies that programmes are packaging for a more primitive fact: power has to be contested, not inherited, blessed, or seized.

Ben Jelloun, writing from a postcolonial Maghreb context marked by authoritarian reflexes and the performance of legitimacy, knows that "periodically" is the hinge. One election doesn’t make a democracy; repetition does. Regularity is the antidote to the strongman’s favorite narrative: that stability requires a single, permanent custodian. The quote quietly insists that leadership is conditional, leased rather than owned.

"Make a bid for power" sharpens the cynicism. It borrows the language of auctions and markets, hinting at persuasion, branding, and transaction. Voting becomes less a romantic communion than a public mechanism for channeling ambition into procedure. That’s why the line works: it’s idealistic about the necessity of choice, unsentimental about the motives involved, and pointed about the only safeguard that matters - institutionalized competition that returns, on schedule, to ask the country again who gets to rule.