Col. Putin, aptly described as ‘alpha dog’ by the smitten Mrs Clinton, has won his Duma elections — square, if not necessarily fair. In his day Comrade Stalin, the alpha dog’s role model, sagely grasped the essence of elections, and he didn’t mind sharing his wisdom with posterity. ‘What matters,’ he taught (Comrade Stalin always ‘taught’, he never just spoke), ‘isn’t how the votes are cast. It’s how they are counted.’ He then proceeded to prove his point by routinely scoring 105% in local elections.
Western and Russian observers have commented on all sorts of irregularities in yesterday’s elections, in which the alpha dog’s party polled about 50% of the vote, down from 64.3% last time, but enough for a landslide. The repertoire of the ‘irregularities’ was reassuringly broad: homeless people in Moscow bribed to stuff stacks of ballot papers into the boxes, old ladies threatened into signing piles of absentee ballots, the opposition’s messages kept out of all the broadcast media, local mayors and governors confidently predicting famines if any other party got in, coachloads of voters floating from one polling station to another — you name it. You might say that the alpha dog has learned some of his bag of tricks from the more mature democracies, such as Mayor Daley’s Chicago and other US political machines. But that would be missing the point, even though some of the ‘irregularities’ did swing Illinois Kennedy’s way in 1960. And Lyndon Johnson (nicknamed ‘landslide Lyndon’ after winning his first congressional election by a couple of dozen votes) did rely on the votes of Texans long since dead.
But compared to the ultimate stratagem all such chicanery is child’s play and, in Russia’s instance, no more than the icing on the cake. No doubt the alpha dog’s party did resort to some of those tricks, but this was just for insurance. It would have won anyway. For the Russian spivs have learned from ours the only lesson that really counts: if you want to guarantee victory, make sure the voters have no viable alternative.
The lesson was learned and inwardly digested. The nearest rival to United Russia polled just 19% of the vote, which is worryingly high, considering it’s the somewhat compromised Communist party. The liberal opposition languished at half that percentage, which isn’t surprising, since it’s politically inept and intellectually puny. As ‘none of the above’ wasn’t an option on offer, the result was in the bag before the first 10 votes were cast by the same person.
Do you detect similarities? Look at Germany, whose people clearly don’t want to use their hard-earned to support those foreigners who don’t earn anything hard. So what recourse do they have? Punishing the ruling coalition at the polls isn’t going to change anything because there isn’t a single mainstream party in Germany that campaigns on a drastically different platform. They could of course cast protest votes, but even assuming illogically that they’d all end up in the basket of the same party, the people would get a different government but not different policies. Or look at the USA, where the few parties (or Republican candidates) that offered a substantive alternative to Obama had been forced out before the election kicked off in earnest. Or, closer to home, look at us. Suppose you feel about the EU the same way I do, which is to say the same way a tree feels about dogs, and for the same reason. Which party would you vote for to make your views count? Again, you could follow the example of many of my friends and opt for the UKIP. But such an action, though immensely satisfying aesthetically, would be an exercise in futility — unless you seriously expect the UKIP to form the next cabinet.
British voters are thus offered a distinction without a difference. All the candidates we vote for will be drawn from the same spivocratic pool, even if the colour of their lapel decorations may be different. In every meaningful sense we have become a single-party state, just like Russia. It is in this sense that the alpha dog learned his bogus democracy from us. All we have to do now is learn from him how to count votes and coerce voters. Then we can become a single-party state de jure, not just de facto.