The Russian government once again has krept further away from any resemblance of a democracy and into a full authoritarian regime. Violating basic civil liberties and the principle of fair elections, Russian police raid hundreds of houses and detain citizens for the simple act of supporting opposition leader Alexey Navalny. The anti-Kremlin, ex-presidential candidate, and Progress Party leader recently promoted \u2018tactical voting\u2019, a method in which Russian voters chose the candidate most likely to beat the Kremlin party, a political attempt to oust Putin allies.
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This tactical voting style is also minorly seen within the present U.S. Democratic Party. The hashtag #VoteBlueNoMatterWho currently trends on social media, alluding to the desire of Democrats to vote out President Trump in the 2020 election, regardless of the candidate. As Navalny and his peer leaders were barred from running for office, they went to the extreme- supporting the Communist Party, with hopes of taking away pro-Kremlin seats. This is comparable to Democrats encouraging support for the entire scale of their party: varying from center leaning candidate Joe Biden to registered independent and Democratic-Socialist, Bernie Sanders.
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Although these offenses of liberty by President Putin and the Kremlin Party are harsh, they have strong reasoning to do so.President Putin’s United Russia party \u201csuffered significant losses in Moscow\u201d after multiple recent elections.The outcome of the Moscow city parliament election left the Kremlin with a majority, but only by a mere 2 seats. To keep his executive power Putin must pressure these opposition parties out of popularity.
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Navalny\u2019s statement, \u201cHow will he (Putin) now prove that he has a majority behind him?\u201d exemplifies Navalny\u2019s confidence in the rising Opposition effort to potentially weaken the Kremlin. Although current elections have gone in Nalvany\u2019s favor, it only takes President Putin\u2019s military command to suppress their endeavors, as he has already done by barring Nalvany from candidacy and authorizing police raids of anti-Kremlin supporters.
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Could this fight for fair elections eventually lead to the next wave of democracy? Will the Opposition one day be able to tear down the Kremlin, or will Putin and his elites always be powerful enough to control the votes of their citizens?
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These pro-democratic efforts will lead up to the parliamentary election in 2021, where the world will see the true extent of President Putin\u2019s popularity.
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The Russian government once again has krept further away from any resemblance of a democracy and into a full authoritarian regime. Violating basic civil liberties and the principle of fair elections, Russian police raid hundreds of houses and detain citizens for the simple act of supporting opposition leader Alexey Navalny. The anti-Kremlin, ex-presidential candidate, and Progress Party leader recently promoted… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":143,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[49,130,131,129,22,10],"class_list":["post-4060","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-article","tag-elections","tag-kremlin","tag-navalny","tag-protests-2","tag-putin","tag-russia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/europeandrussiablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4060","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/europeandrussiablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/europeandrussiablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/europeandrussiablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/143"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/europeandrussiablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4060"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/europeandrussiablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4060\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4061,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/europeandrussiablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4060\/revisions\/4061"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/europeandrussiablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4060"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/europeandrussiablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4060"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/europeandrussiablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4060"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}