By Using Crude Power to Remove Opponents from Election, Kremlin Highlights Its Weakness and Fear, SerpomPo Telegram Channel Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, August 30 – The Kremlin’s use of its crude police powers to remove opposition candidates leads to “the paradoxical conclusion” that in so doing, “the leaders of the country are revealing their weakness,” showing they don’t believe the ratings or the achievements they claim to have, the SerpomPo telegram channel says.

            “If under conditions of total control of the media, enormous financial resources and complete power,” all this suggests that those in power do not think that they are in a position to defeat in local, regional and federal elections opposition candidates, even with falsifications” (https://t.me/SerpomPo/10701 reposted at echo.msk.ru/blog/serpompo2018/2895234-echo/).

            What those in power are doing only further weakens them, “depriving them of real stimuli even for limited changes by demonstrating that the system is capable of responding to the demands of citizens … This is the inevitable result the power vertical in Russia has produced,” the channel continues.

            That by acting in this way, the powers “continue to increase the size of the abyss between them and the country” and show that in the end, the order they want to maintain is in fact anything but stable and likely to last. Instead, at some critical point, populists will become their interlocutors and they will lose.

            Clearly, “correct political conclusions from the disintegration of the Russian Empire and the USSR have not been made,” the SerpomPo telegram channel says. The only one those now in power have reached is that everything would have been all right if there had just been more policemen when things got tough.