Apparently Putin’s landslide victory means Russian morale is low.
Other bangers from this collective of intellectual giants include claims that the massive turnout victory for Putin in Russia in fact demonstrates “things are not well”, "the economy is collapsing, “the military is resisting orders”, and “the population knows he is a thief”. Seriously they are literally writing this on Twitter…
Westerners are taught that a “healthy” democracy is one where no one likes the candidates on the ballot and is forced to pick between two awful options. The idea that people could actually approve of their government in large numbers is seen as a political unicorn in the west. Therefore, any government or politician with high approval ratings is clearly just rigging the election and faking things to trick westerners for some reason.
A real democracy is one where the ruling party or leader has at most a 30% approval rating. Anything more is undemocratic. You’re not supposed to like your government or think it’s doing a good job, and god forbid the government actually does something for the people that the people want and approve of, that would be “bribing” the voters, only Awful Authoritarian Autocratic despots do that.
Of course, you want some kind of…populist to win?! Someone who gets elected because they actually do things the people approve of? That’s the most dictatorial thing I’ve ever heard!
Actually doing things for the people is called “populism”, which we know is bad of course since the masses aren’t smart enough to want any policies.
That’s a very astute observation. Cynicism has overtaken the Western political spectrum, and they know no other way to view politics elsewhere. European, US and their vassal governments are set up to launder money and siphon wealth to the elites. Therefore everyone must be set up this way.
Even if that viewpoint was true. Putin is a war-time president in a war that is going well and Russia doing better and better during this duration. How would any voter consciously risk Russia losing this momentum?
The reality of these kinds of posts is that the Russian election results are forcing the West to face the futility of the gigantic attrocity they’ve commited in Ukraine. The whole point of Maidan and the subsequent provocations for war with Russia was not to get Ukraine to join NATO. The West didn’t suddenly start loving Ukraine. The whole point was to destabilize Russia and get Putin out, so they can return it to its colonial status of the 90s. They’ve achieved the exact opposite. And they can’t let their people understand this. So the narrative being set is “We did everything right, but Putin rigged the elections because he’s obviously a bad guy”.
This is exactly right, and excellently explained by the way!
Thanks! I’ll add that the hypocrisy of these propagandists is underlined when we observe their silence over Zelenski cancelling Ukrainian elections, which were supposed to happen this May. The West proclaims that the president who cancels elections represents democracy, but the president who wins elections overwhelmingly is an authoritarian dictator.
I wouldn’t even call it hypocrisy, as in both cases it is consistent with their conception of democracy, which is that if you bow down to western diktat in every way you are democratic, if not then you are an authoritarian dictator.
Their conception of democracy has nothing to do with elections or free speech or anything of the sort and everything to do with cowtowing to the US as the global hegemon and allowing western capital to plunder your country.
By that definition Zelensky is indeed a champion of democracy, as were Pinochet, Suharto, Somoza, etc.
Conversely, too much popular approval for a leader is generally considered to be un-democratic by supporters of liberal democracy, and they call it things like “mob rule” when a leader actually does what the majority wants. You see real democracies act in the interest of small minorities of moneyed elites and otherwise have political systems that are designed to be as dysfunctional and byzantine as possible which safeguards against dangerous “populist” policies ever being implemented.
I agree, they are very consistent. It is all about capital, if western capital has authority in the policies of X country then it is democratic, if it doesn’t then Y country is authoritarian.
It has never been about the people.
Apparently it’s okay for Zelenskyy to cancel elections because he’s fighting a war and therefore needs to keep power for national security reasons or whatever. It’s not a good defence but its the one they’re using.
TBH, people in Russia less ‘approve’ of Putin and more ‘hate the pro-Western opposition more’, so the difference with Western elections is pretty minuscule.
So it is like western elections…
I think if Putin is fighting the thing they don’t like, he’s probably somewhat approved of for that alone. There definitely seems to be a Russian consensus on Putin.
Resident Slav here. There is far from a consensus or rally behind Putin, most people also don’t care at all about the things he’s fighting against, they care more for their material conditions and how they have improved under Putin. It’s not a utopia, or even entirely “good”, but a far cry from the disaster and humiliation of the Yeltsin years.
Collatz was more correct as Putin as seen more as a figurehead against the worse liberal opposition, not someone particularly to look up to or agree with.
Point taken. In your estimation, what kind of president would Russian people actually “look up to or agree with”? If neither Yeltsin nor Putin?
Someone who could allow them to feel proud about their country and see themselves as reclaiming Russia’s former glory. Not through campaigns of militarism or war even, but ushering in an age of scientific progress, socialist ideal that both improves the living conditions of the average person, and create a long term future for the country while truly embodying the national spirit of Russia and the Soviet Union. Instead of someone who simply improves their material conditions a tiny bit.
Putin uses the Russian empire and the Soviet Union to create a sort of nationalistic rally point so that people will back him, but it’s very empty and hollow. No one cares when Putin talks about the tsars, or how big the Soviet Union was, or more or less fighting the “woke”. They want to feel proud in their nation.
For that reason, even in a victory, Ukraine will harm Putin’s position in the long term, as it is seen as a Brothers War and scrabbling in the dirt, much like Chechnya.
TLDR, they want a Lenin or Stalin. Hell, people will take a Khrushchev at this point.
Chuds do love Trump tho.