Boris Nadezhdin seeks to run in the March 17 presidential election in Russia. The question now is whether authorities will allow him on the ballot.
The stocky, bespectacled 60-year-old local legislator and academic has struck a chord with the public, openly calling for a halt to the conflict in Ukraine, the end of mobilizing Russian men for the military, and starting a dialogue with the West. He also has criticized the country’s repression of LGBTQ+ activism.
And yet every election there is widespread fraud.
Didn’t we even watch them on CCTV last time doing it or was that the time before? It gets hard to remember when, when there so much of it.
Yup, there is. And it’s not a democratic system. But the point is that, even to the autocratic cannibals that are currently in power, it matters to keep a sizeable chunk of the population just content enough to be a majority supporter of the status quo. Thus, elections matter. They are a way to gauge the stability of the system. I have no doubt that, prior to the elections, the party will expend a lot of its resources to placate, inspire, threaten, confuse the population in its favor. Stuff like further mobilisations and austerity measures will come after the elections.