Especially when we can’t even live under Jefferson’s ideas.
The state DUMA has four main political parties.
United Russia - Putin’s party, and the dominant political force. Center right on economic issues, moving further right in some aspects, but heavily corrupted by oligarch interests and such. Socially pretty conservative, apparently now moving further right on abortion which has decimated the country’s demography. This is Russia’s bread and butter. The party of the common man, the middle-tier folk.
Communist Party of the Russian Federation - Is as its name implies. The corrupt holdovers of late-era communism, radicals, and oligarchs who Putin has alienated find a place here. Many poor individuals vote for them, and they are the second largest party.
A Just Russia - I think this is what many people refer to when they say ‘the Russian opposition’, although they aren’t as big as the commies. They’re socialists, as socially liberal as you’re likely to get in Russia (voted unanimously for the anti-homosexual propaganda bill, and one of their members was the author). This is the party of the student movement, and many cosmopolitan Russians. They favor a welfare state.
Political Party LDPR - Russia’s resident ‘far right’ group, although primarily just a nationalist outfit. The home of the thriving Russian skinhead movement. They want the Chechens deported, Imperial Russia restored, and they consider the West enemy no.1
Russian politics is completely alien to our own, so it is hard to get a handle on how it all works, but I’d agree there’s just not a better alternative to Putin there, at least not for Russians. The other parties would likely implode its relatively fragile economy.
The opposition is really in no position to take on Putin either. You have two ‘left wing’ parties, but together, they don’t even come close to half of the representatives in the DUMA, since you can’t count on the highly nationalist LDPR to vote with globalist left wingers. Its like an article I read on the Hungarian elections where they accused the ‘center-right’ president of not being legitimate because the opposition got almost as many votes, failing to mention that a huge chunk of that opposition was the even further right, Jobbik party.
Wish I had hung around on this thread yesterday, your stuff is excellent, and we need accurate info to properly analyze Russian and Eastern European events. Kudos.