Posted on 02/04/2018 11:29:14 AM PST by GoldenState_Rose
Why do unfair elections even matter?
Putin’s regime represents - “competitive authoritarianism.” Elections in hybrid systems like Russia are not designed to determine who rules, but rather to signal the regime’s power and resilience to potential challengers.
Elections in these polities are often marred by abuses of state power, but they are nonetheless held and can be bitterly fought. It is tempting to disregard the results of such elections because of the extent to which they are manipulated by elites in power. Yet counterintuitively, the level of state control over the electoral process is itself a reason to pay close attention.
A crushing electoral victory signals to potential opponents that they can expect the regime to remain in power and that open opposition will be futile. But low turnout can communicate the regime’s potential weakness. Challengers may become empowered, while erstwhile allies consider defection to avoid falling on the wrong side of a revolutionary wave.
The Kremlin has high turnout goals for 2018 … The “great power of expectations,” as Hale labels this phenomenon, drives Russian politics — and the Putin regime has set a high bar for itself. Last year, the Kremlin’s top political technologists established a “70 at 70” objective for Putin’s reelection in March 2018 — 70 percent of the vote with 70 percent turnout. In a recent interview, Russian political expert Tatyana Stanovaya remarked, “Putin just needs to be elected quietly and quickly, without fuss, with good turnout, and a good result.”
… but may struggle to meet them September’s regional and municipal elections, though, showed Russians aren’t particularly excited about voting. The low turnout has left the Kremlin scrambling to boost voter enthusiasm for next March. Putin remains popular, but protest activity is rising, particularly in the provinces.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
You can’t lose when you jail everyone else ,LOL
Exactly and while I recognize our own homegrown KGB-copycats in the FBI entertain such Putinist fantasies, we should be grateful that there is still *some* semblance of law and order working in our system so that truth eventually does come out to the public.
Grateful for Trump’s use of Twitter and we don’t just have to rely on Deep State television and radio for his points to get across. The Kremlin has a grip on the internet as well especially during election season. And we need to be careful our own social media elites don’t try to pull a fast one on our elections either. (Under the guise of protecting us from “Russia” LoL.)
For Russians, Putin’s personality and policies are what drive his popularity.
No one else in Russia has his standing. You could perhaps compare him to France’s DeGaulle as someone who shaped his country’s identity and future.
Hard to imagine now what the country will look like when he finally leaves the scene.
Well the sheer fear of having to confront that very question is what keeps Russians loyal to Putin.
He would not be reelected in a free election this time imo, I think that there is this “boycott the election” talk is a barometer of that. Even though, that doesn’t prove it beyond all certainty, places that boycott elections usually have these mickey mouse elections like Venezuela or Kenya.
Putin has more popular support in Russia than Trump has in America. Sad but true.
Russians always say that Navalny is unknown and I kind of ended up believing it until a Freeper made me aware that he got 27% of the votes in Moscow mayoral elections in 2013. I think if they would allow him to run he would at least give an embarrassment to Putin.
The culture that supported the Imperial Czars for so many centuries, supported the Soviet Czars from 1917/22 to 1991, the weak interregnum of Yeltsin, Kuchima & Ledbed (Putin as Vice President), and the mobocracy of Putin since 2000 (with Medvedev giving a “democratic show” from 2008-2012 as “President” while Putin (Prime Minister) still held the power).
As the Soviet Union was felling apart, under Gorbachev, only two institutions in Russia remained intact and in charge of themselves - the KGB and the Russian mobs (which did not die during the Soviet Union). What has happened since the Soviet Union ended is that the KGB & the mob built their own version of the Russian political culture of authoritarianism, on the ashes of the Soviet union just as the Soviet Union did on the ashes of the Russian Imperial Czars. In truth the name of the game and the faces have changed, but Russian political culture and what of it the population accepts and/or tolerates has not changed all that much.
Some background supporting what I said:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2014/12/18/how-he-and-his-cronies-stole-russia/
Some quotes from it:
“In 1994, then-President Boris Yeltsin called Russia “the biggest mafia state in the world,” referring to “the superpower of crime that is devouring the state ...
[my comment: It began before he took power. The “powers that be needed the weak Yelstin for a period, so they could consolidate their interests before actually showing their hand.]
“In league with Russian organized crime, starting at the end of the 1980s, they [KGB and some party bosses concerned not so much with Communism by THEIR loss of power] successfully plotted a return to power under the nose and with naive assistance from Yeltsin. Assisted by the unscrupulous international offshore banking industry, they stole money that belonged to the Russian state, took it abroad for safety, reinvested it in Russia, and then, piece by piece, took over the state themselves. Once in charge, they brought back Soviet methods of political control—the only ones they knew—updated for the modern era.
Using this mass of evidence, Dawisha nevertheless argues that the KGB’s return to power begins not in 2000, when Putin became president, but in the late 1980s. At that time, the then leaders of the KGB, who distrusted Gorbachev, began transferring money that belonged to the Soviet Communist Party out of the Soviet Union and into offshore accounts tended by Swiss or British bankers. At least initially, these transfers took place with the Party’s knowledge. In August 1990, the Central Committee called for measures to protect the Party’s “economic interests,” including the construction of an “invisible” structure, accessible only to “a very narrow circle of people.” KGB operatives who already had experience with managing foreign bank accounts—they’d been funding foreign Communist parties for decades—were put in charge.
By the autumn of 1991—after the KGB-led coup in August to overthrow Gorbachev had failed—almost $4 billion belonging to the Party’s “property management department” had already been distributed to hundreds of Party-, Komsomol-, and KGB-managed banks and companies that were swiftly establishing themselves in Russia and abroad. This was an enormous amount of capital in a country that had, at the time, a scarcely functioning economy and hardly any foreign currency reserves at all. In due course, these funds, and the people who managed them, were to become the real foundation for the economy of post-Soviet Russia. Again, this was not robber baron capitalism, or indeed capitalism at all: instead, a small group was enriched by the state and thereby given the means of acquiring its property.
From the very beginning, Russia’s current president had a part in this process. In the late 1980s, Putin was a KGB officer in Dresden, East Germany. There are conflicting accounts of what he was doing there. In his official and unofficial biographies, Dawisha writes, quoting Putin’s German biographerAlexander Rahr, this period is covered in a “thick fog of silence.” But there is some evidence that he may have been helping the KGB prepare for what it feared could be the imminent demise of the Soviet empire. Indeed, when he became president in 2000, German counterintelligence launched an investigation into whether or not Putin had been recruiting agents who would remain loyal to the KGB even after the collapse of communism. As Dawisha explains, “the Germans were concerned that Putin had recruited a network that lived on in united Germany.”
The writer in the WaPo simply does not understand Russia, understand Russian political culture (why authoritarianism has been favored and/or tolerated for centuries) and how the current “powers that be” in Russia can only seem to lose an election but will not lose control.
Be careful! There might be a dossier about Putin ordering male hookers to poop in a bed in NYC!
Thanks for these citations.
Only God can heal Russia. But the klepto-mafia State’s manage to warp that concept in their favor too - replacing Sickles and Hammers with Orthodox Crosses and Icons.
LOL!
I was just reading about WWII, and New Caledonia—one of Free-France's possessions in the Pacific. The Allies (and France) almost lost a key site to Japan for "the need to be Frenchie-French".
Not true whatsoever. There is a lot of Trump support and growing especially as economy improves.
But if you want to talk in terms of base: Trump actually serves his base whereas Putin’s main priority is fattening the pockets of his crony oligarchs and get impoverished Russians distracted with geopolitical delusions of empire restoration.
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