Moscow just bans any candidate that could threaten Putin's reign.
I cannot understand why they even bother to do the elections at all. It is just for show, and everybody know it. Why not just skip it completely?
The law / constitution requires that elections be held. You can't break the law without a lot of people noticing. But you can bend it sufficiently to ensure you win.
It's not about noticing, it's about magical thinking.
Voters feel as if the government has some strength if they voted for somebody or "chose not to vote".
That government feels that even if there's no intrigue at all, having a vote makes them somehow popular.
Source - live in Russia, know this shit.
Ah, I see. In my country the party in power will do whatever they can get away with to improve their chances of winning. So we have elections, but they aren't really 'fair'.
There are gradations. Most likely in your country the elections are more real than in Russia.
I'm talking about the reason that ritual even exists, and the effect it has.
Instead of imprisoning people it's more efficient to allow them to imprison themselves.
Some random Russian middle-age school teacher just goes on with their not particularly happy life because 1) they think they should limit themselves and everybody is doing that and 2) they think they've taken an obligation, as imperfect as the process may be.
Medieval monarchs had their subjects swear oaths for a reason, even though the supporting layer would be jails and gallows.
Humans are not rational beings. We do not act on universal principles. We act on instincts.
All this is intended to persuade "subjects" to control themselves and "sheriffs" (which are a crowd too, state apparatus is too big a thing to be attributed conscious goals at ruling a country) to think that their position is safe.
I was very unhappy until I realized this, in many areas of life.
They feel themselves stronger if an election was held. The populace feels itself somehow weaker and obligated to obey if an election was held.
See my other comment under this post.
The same reason the US still likes to refer to itself as a democracy. Theater.
America still operates mostly as a democracy. Excepting a few notable cases elections matter. That's why we had an insurrection: the fascist lost and got angry.
You can argue it's really controlled by special interests but it's still a democracy. Russia doesn't have real elections AND it's controlled by the oligarchs.
The theater of American politics operate under the banner of "democracy", sure, but believing that it is therefore a democracy is simply naive. "Democratic republic" pedantism aside, if it were what it claims to be, several things would've been updated/phased out as obsolete long ago (eg. Electoral College, etc.) and others would not have been allowed to persist (eg. SuperPACs, etc.), but instead, we drink the Kool-Aid like it's a birthright and go about our peasant lives, high on hopium and baseless dreams.
Why did the US suddenly become a part of this discussion?
The US is absolutely a flawed democracy, no doubt about that. However the people's vote in the elections does have a real impact on the political decisions of the country.
The amount of influence the voters have can be debated, but it is far from nothing. Thus the US elections are not purely theaterical, and therefore there is sense in having elections in the US.
Your logic is flawed, friend.
Yeah I know it is a theater, that is what I said. What I don't understand is why they keep it up? It seems so pointless, but they still hold "elections". What ie the reason for that?
Maybe he likes the fanfare? Winning an election is like a celebration, throw parties and stuff.
That is the most plausible explanation I have heard yet.
For the suckers "born every minute", of course.
To show it to Ukraine probably.
Moscow bars any candidate that isnt putin
Putin: "But Colorado did it first"
Something that happened or was uncovered recently anywhere in the world. It doesn't have to have global implications. Just has to be informative in some way.
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