US presidential election ‘extraordinarily unwelcome’ for Putin, Shlosberg says

If Vladimir Putin was pleased with the results of the 2016 US presidential election in which his operatives intervened, he is anything but by both the competitiveness of the race in 2020 and perhaps even more of the careful counting of votes that is gradually turning the result against the incumbent, Lev Shlosberg says. The Kremlin’s propaganda machine has poured out stories about the problems of the American political system, but none of these, the Pskov Oblast Assembly deputy from Yabloko Party says, “can mask the primacy of federalism [in the US] where the voices of voters from each state have their own voice and importance.” “Russia is not America and America is not Russia, but a situation when the incumbent and possibly losing president emotionally appeals to the Supreme Court (even before submitting a suit) as to the highest power but cannot direct the government election system in any way unmask Russian reality” in ways Putin cannot find welcoming, Shlosberg says. According to the Pskov deputy, “the demand for honest elections is a natural demand of any individual. It arises from the dignity of the human person, the respect of the state for the citizen, the internal desire of an individual to influence the powers, to know about its origin and to control it.” “Not having any possibility of seeing honest elections in Russia,” Shlosberg says, “people watch them as if they were in another reality, and this living reality attracts and draws them in.” And he reminds both Russians and Americans of something both have often forgotten: The demise of the Soviet Union began when it became clear to Russians that Americans lived differently and better than they did because they were able to order their own lives and control their government as Russians quite clearly could not.

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