ŽDANOKA v. LATVIA JUDGMENT – DISSENTING OPINION OF JUDGE ROZAKIS 51 are elected on the basis of their personality, ideas and opinions as revealed to the public before the elections), and, secondly, the safety valve of postelectoral scrutiny: if an elected representative does not stand up to the expectations of his or her electorate, he or she will probably lose their confidence, and, in the end, his or her seat in Parliament. The election of parliamentarians to express their electorate’s expectations lies at the core of a representative democracy, whatever their opinions are, and however displeasing these latter are to other strata of society. In a system of sound democratic governance the criterion of eligibility cannot be determined by whether a politician expresses ideas which seem to be acceptable to the mainstream of the political spectrum, or loyal to the established ideologies of the State and society, but by the real representativeness of his or her ideas vis-à-vis even a very small segment of society. Accordingly, if a politician is prevented from representing part of society’s ideas, it is not only he or she who suffers; it is also the electorate which suffers, it is democracy which suffers. For these reasons prohibitions on eligibility to stand for election should be very exceptional and very carefully circumscribed. One can, of course, understand that a State may introduce eligibility conditions of a technical nature, such as those referred to in the Convention’s jurisprudence and considered in some cases already examined by the Strasbourg institutions (see paragraphs 103 et seq. of the judgment). One can also understand that in certain very exceptional circumstances, the very protection of the primary value of democracy may call for a prohibition on the exercise of the rights contained in Article 3 of Protocol No. 1. But in such circumstances, the State cannot of course escape the scrutiny of the Convention institutions, which should carefully delineate the limits of the State’s liberty to restrain the passive right of a politician or a political party to be elected. In this respect, the judgment of this Court in the case of Refah Partisi (the Welfare Party) and Others v. Turkey ([GC], nos. 41340/98, 41342/98, 41343/98 and 41344/98, ECHR 2003-II) is extremely illustrative of the way in which the Strasbourg institution has dealt with the very difficult and delicate matter of the prohibition of a political party from participating in national elections. Indeed, in Refah Partisi we were confronted with a situation in which a political party propagating undemocratic ideas directly threatening the fragile political infrastructure of Turkey had had a strong possibility of seizing power by using the democratic electoral procedures provided by the system. The danger was “real and present”, to use the famous dictum of the United States Supreme Court. And our Court correctly considered that, in such exceptional circumstances, a “State cannot be required to wait, before intervening, until a political party has seized power and begun to take concrete steps to implement a policy incompatible with the standards of the Convention and democracy, even though the danger of