Putin's sham election shows even strongmen can have fragile egos

OPINION: It seems odd how even dictators want the imprimatur of the ballot box.

If you have absolute power, why go through the theatrics of a people’s vote?

Vladimir Putin won the Russian election with almost 90 per cent of the vote.

Russian President Vladimir Putin won the election with 90 per cent of the vote.

Sounds impressive, until you compare that to Saddam Hussein’s last poll in 2002 when Iraqi voters were given a choice all wanna-be-dictators may wish to cut and paste: “Should Saddam Hussein be given another seven-year term?”

The result: Yes – 100 per cent; No – 0 per cent.

No need to go to preferences.

Now that’s how you dictate.

Why does Vladimir Putin bother with a sham election when the outcome is known before the first vote is cast?

The performative ballot was so important to him that some areas of Russia offered prizes including cash and cars to encourage people to vote.

Occupied parts of Ukraine saw a different form of encouragement: the threat of arrest.

Even strongmen can have fragile egos.

Often, especially so.

Winning elections, even when all legitimate opponents are in exile, in jail, or dead, allows them to convince themselves they really are in power by the will of the people.

“Our democracy is the best,” Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said.

And who in Russia would argue with him? Who would dare?

True democracy is much harder.

It requires constant reinforcement and protection.

The performative ballot was so important to Putin that some areas of Russia offered prizes including cash and cars to encourage people to vote.

I saw in Iraq you can’t impose democracy.

I followed US forces into Baghdad in April 2003.

It was chaos.

The Saddam regime had been in power for a generation.

Now the head was cut off.

No garlands of flowers awaited the American forces.

They were not greeted as liberators but occupiers.

This was not Paris, 1944.

The next few years saw increasing violence as the fight for power in the new Iraq saw an estimated 100 thousand civilians killed, and various governments were tainted by corruption and cronyism.

This was not the poster child for democracy.

Truly representative government is like a bridge; you cannot start at the top and build down.

It has to come from the ground up.

Democracy can die quickly, such as in General Pinochet’s coup d’état Chile.

Or it can be slowly extinguished, as it is now in Victor Orban’s Hungary.

The independence of the judiciary, press freedom, LGBT rights, academic freedom have all been reduced so much that the EU Parliament found Hungary can no longer be considered a democracy but “electoral autocracy”.

And then there is India.

The world’s largest democracy, India, starts its elections next month.

And a very recent survey found 67 per cent supported autocratic rule.

Not a vote of confidence in the current system.

The premise of representative democracy is simple: my vote carries as much weight as yours.

It is an intrinsic article of faith; that the system represents the people who participate in it.

If people lose faith in that, democracy is doomed.

So, consider these words: “If I don’t get elected, it’s gonna be a bloodbath for the whole – that’s gonna be the least of it. It’s gonna be a bloodbath for the country.”

When one of the two leading candidates for the most powerful job in the world, the US presidency, says there will be a “bloodbath” if he loses, it would be easy to dismiss such words as rhetorical flourish.

If you ignored recent history.

There was a violent attack on the US capital during the last change of power and it did involve blood being spilled.

Long before the American experiment with democracy began, when the first Puritans set sail for Massachusetts Bay, John Winthrop famously said their new home would be “a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us”.

The eyes of the world still remain on that city.

America’s democracy is being tested at the ballot box this year in a way that is shaping to be the greatest challenge since the Civil War.

Democracy requires belief in the system, that my vote carries equal weight to your vote.

Undermine that belief, you put democracy in peril and open the door to autocracy or worse.

If you want to see how that can turn out, ask Alexei Navalny’s widow.