IT used to be so simple. Voting was like driving: turn the wheel left and the car would move left, nudge it right and it would shift right. All that it took to effect a national change in direction was a majority of votes. Everyone understood the idea and we called it democracy.

This Sunday sees a profound challenge to that simple notion and it comes in the form of two very different elections — one in Greece, the other in Egypt. For once it is no exaggeration to say the future of both countries hangs in the balance. In Egypt, this was billed as the moment that would entrench last year’s revolution, the high watermark of the wider Arab awakening. For Greeks, this is the election that determines whether they belong in or out of the eurozone, even whether the single currency survives or dies.

Those stakes would be high enough. And yet it is democracy itself that is now being tested. That’s most obvious for Egyptians, currently wondering whether there is any point in casting their ballots at all. On Thursday, the country’s constitutional court — its bench packed with Mubarak-era judges — dissolved the parliament elected six months ago in Egypt’s first free elections for more than 60 years. The parliament was dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, but plenty of secular and liberal Egyptians were outraged by the dissolution, all reaching for the same word: ‘coup’.

They branded this a power-grab by Egypt’s military rulers who, faced with the prospect of the Brotherhood candidate winning the presidency in the weekend’s run-off, are refusing to let go. Democracy in Egypt, which waited so long to be born, may yet be strangled at birth. Those 2011 dreams of a swift democratic transformation, spreading from Tunis to Cairo to Tripoli to Damascus, seem long ago and forlorn.

But let’s be hopeful, perhaps naive, and say the Egyptian military brass relents and respects the current elections, even if that means allowing the Muslim Brotherhood to hold both parliament and the presidency. Even that might not be enough. A former Obama administration official told me that the ‘international community’ would want to see several clear commitments from a new Islamist government in Cairo: guarantees of women’s rights, minority rights and open, contested elections as well as a promise to abide by peace agreements with Israel and so on. All those demands are legitimate in themselves, but the underlying thinking is tricky. It promises to work with an Islamist government just so long as that government tones down the Islamism. It says to the Egyptian people: ‘You can elect a leopard if you want, just so long as it changes its spots.’

The Greece case is much more stark. Voters there seem determined to oppose the current, IMF-imposed rush to austerity, either by slamming on the brakes with a vote for the leftist Syriza or by easing the pace with the conservative New Democracy party. The question is, will they be allowed to do that? Or will the countries of the eurozone, led by Germany, insist that any softening on austerity automatically ushers the Greeks towards the exit?

The point is, the answer is not in the Greeks’ own hands. They are subject to the decisions of others, over whom they have no democratic control. Fair enough, you might say, since the Greeks are demanding the help of others. — The Guardian, London