In the recent Russian parliamentary elections many leaders of small opposition factions gave their supporters the same advice: ignore your own political preferences, but don’t ignore the elections. Please come and vote for any big party except the ruling party. Eventually the ruling party got less than 50%.
I haven’t followed Russian politics much for the last few years, and I’m just asking for curiosity: do you think the result was due to this appeal, rather than just because of popular resentment that would have been demonstrated anyway? Looking at the figures from Wikipedia, the overall voter turnout appears to be smaller than in 2007, which would suggest the latter hypothesis.
As far as I understand, the ruling party got what it wanted: 53% (or something like that) of Parliament seats, which gives it a controlling interest in Russian politics. It got what it wanted by using a proven, time-honored tactic called “voting fraud”.
We can probably learn some sort of a lesson from Russian politics, but “your vote counts as long as you cast it wisely” is not it.
In the recent Russian parliamentary elections many leaders of small opposition factions gave their supporters the same advice: ignore your own political preferences, but don’t ignore the elections. Please come and vote for any big party except the ruling party. Eventually the ruling party got less than 50%.
I haven’t followed Russian politics much for the last few years, and I’m just asking for curiosity: do you think the result was due to this appeal, rather than just because of popular resentment that would have been demonstrated anyway? Looking at the figures from Wikipedia, the overall voter turnout appears to be smaller than in 2007, which would suggest the latter hypothesis.
Good point. I don’t know. Edited my comment.
As far as I understand, the ruling party got what it wanted: 53% (or something like that) of Parliament seats, which gives it a controlling interest in Russian politics. It got what it wanted by using a proven, time-honored tactic called “voting fraud”.
We can probably learn some sort of a lesson from Russian politics, but “your vote counts as long as you cast it wisely” is not it.