I’m just trying to understand. Erdogan in Turkey, Putin in Russia, Orban in Hungary etc… Why do these leaders still get so much support after all they’ve done? What do they exactly like about them?
Aren’t these people seeing a massive drop in their quality of life?
Because compromise is messy and progress is incremental and sometimes hearing someone yell words that sound true will make you feel like you’ve found the answer to all the political bullshit.
In Hungary, one big reason is that the government has all the media coverage, and they basically created a false narrative that if Orbán loses, then a) the previous government will come back and no matter how bad things are right now, it will be WORSE, b) migrants will come and wreak havock, c) our sons will have to go to war (in the last election, the opposition lost a lot of votes because there was a billboard campaign stating that the new PM candidate would send soldiers to Ukraine), d) there will be some kind of woke dictatorship.
People also think that the bad quality of life is mostly the fault of the EU and the previous government (which was in power over a decade ago…), and that it’s okay that Orbán and his party steals from them because at least they’re “on their side”.
The government also provides some help to parents, which people find valuable, so they keep voting for FIDESZ.
People are seeing a massive drop in their quality of life before they vote for an authoritarian.
That’s why they vote for strongmen - the neoliberals that were in charge before fucked everything up, and without any understanding of why that happened they just react by electing the opposition.
Except that leaders like Orban or Erdogan have been in power for like a decade already.
Sure, once these types get in to power they’re hard to dislodge.
Quality of life declines, people vote for a strongman. Then, once he’s in, he just has to make sure he isn’t the one that gets blamed for continuing declining quality of life. They usually control the media and suppress political opponents, and it doesn’t help that the alternative being offered is just a return to the previous neoliberal politics that oversaw the start of the decline in the first place.
Eventually people get fed up and turn to more radical solutions, but they have to lose faith in voting first.
Those leaders offer simple answers to complex social problems and claim to restore their country to the halcyon days of yore. The days when there were no immigrants, liberals, degeneracy or whatever “came later to ruin the country.”
Also the voters may believe that voting against their interests somehow benefits them.
Some other factors that I have noticed -
- Since most of the democracies determine the result based on first past the post (FPTP) or closely related voting system, the candidates only need to get 50% of the voting population to agree with them. They focus on populist policies that resonate with at least 50.1% of the population even if those policies will be detrimental to the remaining 49.9%.
- The opposition is not seen as strong enough to lead the country. This was the case in recent Turkish elections and has been the case in the last 3 Indian elections. Erdogan and Modi keep winning because people who don’t want to vote for them are not convinced by the other candidates’ abilities to lead the country. So many of the opposing people don’t vote at all or have their votes fragmented across multiple candidates in FPTP systems. That was and also remains the concern with Biden in the US.
- Once these leaders are in power, they actively suppress the voice of the minorities, by controlling the media and law enforcement, or by making it harder for minorities to vote and express themselves. This reduces the total voting population in favor of these leaders which again benefits them get past the 50% votes. Ultimately, we observe the vicious cycle of more power consolidation over time and more authoritarianism.
There is a whole system of media devoted to getting normal folks to vote against their own interests. In the regimes you list (and I’d argue also in western so called liberal democracies too but to a lesser extent) the capitalist class and political class are so intertwined due to influence and corruption, that whatever the needs and whims of the leading politicians, the media machine will distract and manipulate. The same tactics that they use are the ones which have worked since the start of mass media, they know how human psychology works.
Appealing to emotional arguments, external threats, racism, nationalism. Remember these are political tools, unfortunately very effective ones, as we saw in fascism in the 1900s. A curious consequence is that often, the worse things get for the normal people, the easier it is for these malicious actors to spin and manipulate and blame it on an external force or political enemy which deflects blame or allows for more extreme political ideology to rise in a society. So you get an accelerated political extremism.
The idea of someone that strong to make a change persuade people to vote them or they just already spreading fear to the people but not just that, this one is a bit unique, I think. Well, in El Salvador they got Bukele which basically a dictator, you can search it. In his term, democracy is decreasing but the homicide feel down drastically on country that so dangerous before, now they just could walk on the street without afraid getting shot and die.
Once a competent authoritarian leader takes root, it becomes very hard to remove him: the necessary mechanisms, formal or informal, tend to be sabotaged - not at once, but more and more over the years. It also helps when some of opposition have their lives broken, when uncertainty about one’s own life is high, the value of human life low, when loyalty is placed above both competence and the law, and the law above competence, when the reputation of any possible contenders is questionable or made questionable, when people are used to the thought of futility of resistance (with fresh examples produced all the time) and being alone before the oppression, when somewhat educated people are made to think their views are in minority (independently of whether it’s the case) and some of less educated people have some of their misery alleviated (and are occasionally given some power they did not deserve) in return for voicing the pro-government position (even if a good measure of said misery is a consequence of the government’s actions).
The same reason Republicans still manage to win elections… through massive amounts of fraud and “gaming the system”. People don’t understand how thoroughly “representative democracy” is rigged - it can barely even be called “representative,” never mind “democratic.”
You also have Democrats willing to work with Republicans to carve out their own gerrymandering districts. Jim Clyburn was recently exposed for helping the Republicans in his state carve up the biggest black majority city into small sections diluted by the suburban white voters. This created only one black majority area which is where Clyburn runs.
If it were properly sectioned off then maybe two or three districts could be made with higher black populations that would have to compete to maybe have black friendly candidates.
Jim Clyburn is an Uncle Tom like traitor to democracy. https://www.propublica.org/article/how-rep-james-clyburn-protected-his-district-at-a-cost-to-black-democrats
They have control over the media so the only side of the story people hear is that they are wonderful leaders and that the only people who oppose them are low class idiots, possibly criminals.
Also, they have control over the elections as well so it doesn’t really matter how people vote.
Kind of like what Republicans are trying to do in the US.
People like authoritarians. Especially one they agree with, which many do.
Even in the US we have children’s programming replete with kings and queens ruling over people. How many people watch things like Black Panther and think “this would be so much better with a Congress debating what direction to take”? I mean other than me…
Dictators get things done compared to committees and legislatures. Nobody likes compromise.
more often than not, authoritarian leadership coincides with a strong chokehold on local media and strong dismissal or even attempts to completely bar entry of foreign media
think the great firewall, or local newsstation, being subsidiaries of fox, reading the exact same statements from a script across the USA
The short answer is that they think the authoritarian is on their side.
The long answer is that people in groups are stupid and they have been manipulated into thinking the authoritarian is on their side
Democracies work when the voting populace is educated and informed. Unfortunately, humanity willfully avoids being either in favor of opinion and bias.
It’s not “humanity ignoring” it’s propaganda and misinfo.
Might as well be both.
💀
Who else would try to be elected into such a powerful position? I mean, why else would you run, except to exert your own authority?
Go ahead and try to fantasize about what you would do in your first week as the elected leader of your nation. Would you be tough on crime? Restrict access to guns? Criminalize transgender people? Criminalize people who want to hurt transgender people? What about war, or taxes? There’s really no way to do the job without being authoritarian.
Edit: Shit, I was hoping the whole downvote-to-disagree mentality stayed over at Reddit. If you disagree, fine, but at least contribute something of substance to engage with.
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and believe you can improve things in that position (not for some gain, but for the sake of it)
But that’s just it, though. How do you expect to “improve” things from that position without using the authority the position grants you?
Acting on your own preconceptions is not the only way. You can have proper discussions with the representatives of your people, and not suppress social media voicing other opinions.
I think you might be mistaking authoritarianism for totalitarianism. Authoritarianism doesn’t need to go to the extremes that you see with totalitarian dictatorships. Authoritarianism can be just something like banning guns, or drugs, or abortions, or LGBTQ+ people.
If those leaders are not newcomers, which is true for Putin, Erdogan, Orban, Xi and so on, there is also another reason. People understand that these guys would not just leave if people would try to vote them out. They will use election frauds, threats and then open violence. So these attempts to overthrow them either fails at the beginning or would lead to violent turmoil which is highly likely to end up with bad guys winning and tightening the grip even further. A lot of people just want to save those bits of freedom and comfort that they currently have instead of risking it all for the sake of possible (but not exactly likely or guaranteed) better future. If you live long enough in such societies, this starts to work even on subconscious level.
Just look at Hong Kong - people were living in a relatively free society and they revolted against creeping injustice, revolt was violently crushed and society destroyed. Now people would be much more hesitant to even vote for alternative candidates (even if there would be any) because they know or suspect where it may lead
I’m from Hungary, and there’s also the issue of “divide and conquer” between many groups.
- The Roma are almost universally hated because that would invalidate the trauma of a boy that was stabbed for an MP3 player in 2006.
- The trans are almost universally hated because TERFs and some queer people suddenly caring about optics, most infamously by Zsófia Balogh, who ruined Partizán (Hungarian ex-breadtube), and only cares about optics if it benefits her (seriously, she flip-flops between [crappy radfem/tankie talking point] and “the trans are going too far”).
- Gays and lesbians are mostly hated because pedojacketing.
- The disabled is pitied at best, and hated at worst, because Hungarian kusoge developer Tamás “Tomcat” Polgár found Mercedeses and BMWs with disability cards (cards that signal them to be allowed to park in restricted parking lots, even allowing people transferring the disabled to use it), which he photographed and posted to his crappy blog, which automatically means each disabled gets enough money to afford luxury cars. If they’re not hating you, they’ll instead figure out how to give each disabled person a job, because “that teaches good morals”. This usually consists of adjusting or even inventing jobs to caricatures of the disabled.
- There’s also a lot of fights between intellectual and manual laborers. This is mostly seen in the teacher’s strike, where manual laborers (the “real working class”) are accusing them of not wanting to work “real” jobs, and that their jobs are way too easy, and thus are overpaid. Similarly many intellectual workers demean people that aren’t educated enough.
- And don’t get me started on the religious…
Atop of that, many doesn’t want to name the issue with Fidesz, which is creeping cristofascism into mainstream politics. They think a center-right politician like Péter Márki-Zay is “too far left”, want hard right and Christian-theocratic talking points to enshrined as a base point, and serve the big automotive corporations.
The response from many Hungarians, especially of those who don’t vote? “Fidesz is a communist party, because Orbán once supposedly said ‘state-capitalism’, and he is not a real Christian, because he’s hateful, and real Christianity is about loving thy neighbor. If he was a real right-wing politician, he wouldn’t sell out the country to foreign corporations, or nationalize things.”
Note that the “nationalization” is a great misnomer. Fidesz wants to signal to it’s ex-tankie voter base (that are now only interested in work moralism and worshiping some authoritarian leader like a god), but without actually nationalizing things. It mainly consists of giving state money to a Fidesz oligarch (or sometimes a GONGO, like how the book store Libri was bought by MCC, a far-right GONGO), then calling it nationalization. Once a power plant was even sold to Orbán’s personal gas repairman, Lőrinc Mészáros, then bought back by the state for more money than it was sold, essentially making Mészáros to gain money off of the deal.
Once you understand right-wing as “authority of wealth”, this all immediately makes sense. Fidesz is serving a small group of capitalists, both domestic and foreign, but they don’t care about the free market anymore, just to stay in power at all cost. Meanwhile what Hungary needs is lessening the social inequalities, and rebuilding secularism. Not “real” capitalism and “real” Christianity. Especially not “real” work morals.
