Here Putin has 84%! And over there Putin has 184%! Here the opposition are just fringe figures! And over there we've got the guys from Nizhny Tagil (an industrial Russian city often invoked as a symbol of the "common man")—every last one of them is for United Russia.
Well then, go ahead. Win an election against us. You've got 84%, right? Which means everyone else gets 16%—very convenient.
And yet somehow, despite that famous 84%, Putin is afraid to run in an election against us. It seems the election laws can't be tightened any further—we saw in Moscow how they kept everyone off the ballot.
But apparently Putin's 84% is so overwhelming that they still have to play it safe and eliminate any possibility at all—even a purely theoretical one—for the "non-systemic" opposition:
Do you get it? They rig elections, they've completely subordinated the media, they've handed out billions to specially selected "approved" parties—and still they're afraid to run against us.
It's very important that we understand this ourselves. I'm sick of this defeatist whining about the 84%, the supposedly unreachable population, and so on. It's one thing when propagandists on the zombie box (slang for television) go on about it, but when opposition figures themselves do it—that's much worse.
This is the wrong kind of 84%, and certainly not the kind of 84% that should intimidate us.
In a fair election, we would beat them, and even in an unfair one we would be serious competition. Putin understands that, which is why he doesn't want to let us onto the ballot.
As I've written before, the fight for the right to participate in elections is now becoming the most important political slogan. We need to pursue it decisively, rather than settling for voting for "whoever they allow"—all sorts of simulacra and make-believe stand-ins.
By the way, as traditional forms of political struggle are being squeezed out, the role of "people's lawmaking" and lobbying campaigns for the right laws increases many times over. That's one reason why it's so important to take part in our Twenty campaign and vote for the initiative against illicit enrichment.
Here, as we remember, we have a real 87%
People