Putin’s win irks west

EDITORIAL:The Frontier Post

Vladimir Putin has won Russia’s presidential race and the squirming western gang is crying foul. The gang had in fact started screaming that the election would be rigged the moment Putin announced he would contest the poll. And now that he has romped home decisively the gang is shouting that yes it has been rigged. Indeed, US President Barack Obama has gone to the extent of demanding a probe into the poll rigging charges, although no such call was heard from the gang when George W. Bush clinched his first, disputed presidency from the Supreme Court amid charges of a defective ballot paper and the Black- Africans’ widespread complaints that they were prevented from exercising their right to vote in many a place.
But this has always been the way with the western gang that wants elections in foreign lands but only their stooges to be elected, and cry foul if they are not. Even as the international monitors, including the group headed by former US president Jimmy Carter, pronounced the 2006 Palestinian parliamentary election clean, the gang just refused to accept the outcome and its winner Hamas that scored a convincing victory. The gang wanted its rival Fatah to be in place. And so angry was it that in an outright insult to the Palestinian people’s verdict, it just refused to deal with Hamas and took to dirty tricks to prop up Fatah to take on Hamas that has led to an internecine conflict the wretched Palestinians are since struggling staggeringly to patch up.
The gang always wants clowns in foreign capitals playing to its tunes, which it cunningly terms as western values. But since his advent to power in 2000, Putin has demonstrated it conclusively that he is no pushover. While at home he put order and direction on the chaotic conditions prevalent when he took over and pressed his country’s gas and oil wealth to give an economic resurgence to his economically-distressed nation, abroad he asserted a renewed Russia’s clout maximally to the great chagrin of the western gang. Of course, the 12-year-long incumbency, including two presidential spells and one prime ministerial stint, has definitely nibbled into his public backing, as indeed it would in any western democracy, political reputes and public popularities being inherently no permanent fixtures but transient fluctuating phenomena.
His poll ratings that once stood at something like 70 percent have believably tumbled down to 40 percent or so. Still, his all the four challengers were no match to him. They all had very narrow support base, mainly constricted to their own ideological strands. Although the gang would have it believed that they were the only challengers “allowed” in the electoral arena. But the truth is something else. The Russian system is yet to throw up an impressive alternative leadership from within. And no charismatic leadership has still emerged from outside, too. Pluralism is easy to talk about glibly. But for it to happen is not so easy. It cannot be planted on a polity from above; it has to happen on its own dynamism. And it arguably will take Russia quite a time to come out of the shadows of the Soviet Union era’s centralism, and for its people to appreciate, value and practise pluralism.
Nonetheless, by every reckoning, Putin was a shoo-in right from the outset. His win was a forgone conclusion. It was only the gang wishing it otherwise. Indeed, the gang was after him since the December parliamentary contest, in which his United Russia party was a lead winner. Although he has distanced himself latterly from the party, its win drew protests from disgruntled poll contestants and their sympathisers, but which Putin asserts were incited actually by the western gang. His own triumph has sparked protest demonstrations, for which too he is pointing a finger at the gang.
Whatever it is, Putin too has to admit and recognise that in his people’s eye he is now not what he was 12 years ago. There has been a big diminishing in his public approval and he has a lot on his plate to do for refurbishing his public image and to accumulate his people’s goodwill to brighten up his chances for the next race in 2018, if he intends to run again. He had come in with great promises, many of which have gone down the drain, unfulfilled. And his biggest challenge is, ironically, the biggest feat of his incumbency: a burgeoning middle class. It is a huge class of well-educated, most-demanding and ambitiously-aspiring people, mostly young. And it is a fast-expanding class that not only demands opportunities to advance and prosper but civil and political liberties as well. He has to open up and be forthcoming to this budding class which is becoming powerful politically too.
His test will thus be the liberalisation of policies covering political activities, media and civil society, radical economic reforms for equitable distribution of national wealth, elimination of cronyism, favouritism and patronage, purging the administration of widespread corruption and sleaze, disciplining the state agencies and security apparatus, decentralisation of state power concentrated in Kremlin, and devolution of power to the provinces and regions. To be more acceptable to his people, he will have to take off his old hat of a no-nonsensical autocrat and wear new cap of a liberal reformist. The western gang, in any case, will keep going after him.