If you participate in legitimizing the corrupted and corruption, you have no right to complain and criticise the corrupted and corruption, for you helped to establish and strengthening it. You are an accomplice.
And don't deceive yourself. Making a cross on some list every four years, does not mean you have a say. If this shows anything, than only that you have no say at all.
The names on posters come and go - the game stays the same, the corrupted rules stay the same, and that real hidden elite or hidden government, that amalgam of business lobby and political elitists stay the same. It's the same clans and the same secret circles.
And you have no say in their round, voting or not. All the circus you take so serious, is just set up to keep you distracted, and unaware.
I had this in my signature some weeks ago:
"Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people." - Theodore Roosevelt
I remind of Eisenhower's farewell speech on the military-industrial complex.
This combines both and illustrates just one perspective on the problem, defence spendings.
The policy of the two parties in the US, since decades is dominated by just the same generations-old
family clans like the Bushs and the Kennedies, both acting before and behind the curtain, and some more that are less big and less influential, nevertheless are present in US poltics since generations. There is a name for that: feudalism. In Europe, such quasi-feudal structures have been established, too, in the form of parties and life-long career politicians whom you never get rid of by voting them out, since you cannot (they always return in some other post), but by them retiring from their career due to age reasons. They use parties as an industry which has this product to manufactuer: career politicians of a certain character shape and mindset, a production process that does not allow to build other models
You can call this freedom, and democracy, the right of free expression allows you to do that. I call it an empty, hollow facade, and I say since long time we live in the
post-democratic era.
Oh dear, in one year, the campaign circus will run in Germany as well again. Brrrrr.
Strip them off the legitimation, the only one they need to continue, the turnout that is. Make them stand naked and without support, then they cannot claim to be legitimised by "the people" anymore. Keep the turnout low. Don't vote. If then they still cling to power, you have the moral right to revolt and start a revolution. As long as you legitimise them and their ways, you have not, and should be the dog sleeping at its master's feet.