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.
for liberals to attack the actual problems with russian elections, they’d have to use criticisms of democratic countries which would resonate with their own population about where they themselves vote. a total mythology is required to replace actual russian history and current events because reality itself is i guess you could say pretty radicalizing vs information acquired via “economics” and capitalist press
That’s not a problem. They can always fall back upon racist notions like how Asiatic barbarians are incapable of free thought while Western ubermensch are.
The west has democracy, and is democratic. Russia has democracy and is not democratic.
So it’s not democracy that makes the democracy go, it must be something else entirely
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I’ve literally brought that up with libs and Xi before, they proudly declare “If Putin/Xi said the sky was blue, I would look twice.” as if this sort of reactionary ignorance is something to be proud of.
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Can’t wait until considering the western liberals’ opinions are less important than considering the opinions of ants. That will be a great leap forward for humanity.
This always remind me of the Warhammer40k thoughts for the day which were cooked up as the snippets of absolutely over the top dystopian theocratic nazi paranoia, but just quarter of century later the so called “progressive liberals” are in exactly that state of mind.
Gonna be real with you, that is my position on average with the US government and specifically the state department or anything involving intelligence agencies. If the CIA said the sky is blue, I would look twice and still might be sceptical from that moment.
Their internal reports are usually much more accurate (and say the opposite of whatever they feed to the public). If the CIA is telling you “the sky is blue” it isn’t because the sky is green and they’re lying to you, it’s because they’re trying to hide something else in there, so it might be a “the sky is blue, for now, but China is working on a sky-greening device that will change that forever.”
“It’s a moral killer.”
If Putin really is winning “Putin’s war,” why is this surprising? “Wow, a long-standing incumbent is running on wartime success and economic growth in face of sanctions from governments generally hostile to Russia. Why didn’t they write Navalny on the ballot???”
This is a consequence of having your cake and eating it too, where you buy into your own propaganda. Americans want Russians to shoot their own feet to placate “the west,” and call foul when it doesn’t happen because they actually think the CIA talking points they see on the nightly news are an honest reflection of the state of the world. Unfortunately, you can’t have it both ways.
Moral killer for Russians
And check out this even bigger clown predicting 5% for Putin:
And then this gem that indicates he lives in bizarro fantasy land where up is down and overwhelming victory is actually a sign of crushing defeat:
Like, yeah no shit it’s Putin’s last election, genius, he’s 71 years old and has pretty much said he is not going to run for election again six years from now. But when you are used to octogenarians dominating your political system the concept of retiring before your mental faculties start to decline is hard to grasp.
Putin was gonna give himself 50.01% votes to be inconspicuous but the exit polls of turbolib emigres in Europe had him SHOOK and he had to give himself 90% to seem legitimate.
If Putin got 30% (more than the SPD which is now in power in Germany got in the last elections by the way): “See, people hate Putin so much that he can’t even rig the election to win a majority!”
If Putin got 55%: “See, he only won by such a small margin, which he must have rigged anyway, so his real result is probably 5%!”
When Putin wins with almost 90%: “See, we were right, no one could win with that many votes, therefore he probably only got 5% legitimately and was so scared he gave himself an extra 85%!”
Unfalsifiable orthodoxy says what?
Can’t even spell morale
I love how all the western polling in Russia before the election shows that Putin has over 80% approval, and now westies acts like it’s shocking that he got around that in the election. I mean, here’s an example from CNN just a few days ago:
But Putin undoubtedly has reaped the rewards of a political landscape tilted dramatically in his favor. The Levada Center, a non-governmental polling organization, consistently reports Putin’s approval rating at over 80% – an eye-popping figure virtually unknown among Western politicians, and a substantial increase on the three-year period before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/14/europe/putin-russia-election-explainer-update-intl/index.html
