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?
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.
The simple answer is people are stupid, and half of them are even stupider then you might think they are.
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
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.
Under crisis or perceived pressure, there is obvious distrust in the current system. And the desire for a strong leader comes out of a hope of the decisiveness and concentrated power will allow them to “cut through the red tape” and dislodge entrenched stakeholders preventing change. Additionally, if the political and economic system is really complex and have difficult problems that are very systemic and don’t have clear and immediate causes, this simplifying of the politics to all power being concentrated in an individual becomes desirable (this is Joseph Tainter’s idea that social systems that have become too dysfunctional will create “Caesarism”, his name for desiring a strong man leader).
The other major consideration is that a popular leader that has ties to multiple groups can paper over or avoid conflict between multiple stakeholders or polarized factions in a political system. This is why so much veneration and executive power was given to Washington in the US post-revolution, because that got around a lot of arguments and factional issues between North and South and other colony’s conflicting interests. Both Napolean Bonaparte and Loius Napoleon had this as their main opening for power in the post-Revolution chaos and conflicts in the Second Republic, respectively.
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
Well, in Russia, Putin is having his opponents killed/thrown in jail. It’s not a democracy, like in NK where Kim have 99.9% of the vote.
Went here to write this.
Source: I’ve left Russia, where I’ve been born, after war started. Left there my whole family and all friends.
Depends on a lot of things.
Some people are outright sadistic, and just want to be able to step on others. Some people need a de facto father figure (I know a few that suffered under very abusive parents). Some just want a real-life tiny god they can worship. Some just fear. Some actually believe the lies about the fears of migrants, islamists, progressive politics, etc.
I personally voted for Orbán in 2010. I was told gay men will accuse me of homophobia if I reject their advances, that my tax will be spent on welfare for people that are able to work, that liberalism will destroy culture, that I’d be jailed for saying slurs, that “communists” will force me to do hard manual labor I"m incapable of (I’m somewhat disabled), and that feminists ruined my dating chances. I learned a week later, feminism isn’t a “female supremacist” movement, then in a year, almost all of the other lies have crumbled. And now I’m forced to work in the communal work program for full time, below minimum wage, because those old “communists” can’t differentiate between a computer and a Super Nintendo, and office work would turn me into gay (I’m bi with a strong bias towards femme people).
People love having an “enemy” to blame for all their problems.
Throughout history it was often the Jewish people. But immigrants, LGBT, racial minorities work just as well.
Life is inherently unfair. Some people are born into money and never have to work a day in their lives. Others work hard everyday and get almost nothing in return.
It where things like heaven/hell, karma, reincarnation etc. come from. Don’t worry that life sucks there’s a big cosmic force that’ll balance the scales at some point.
We crave something to blame for that injustice and they jump on that.
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.
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.
💀
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.
