Elections in Russia and Venezuela

Well, Putin won, and Chavez lost.

The former was a forgone conclusion, while the latter was a close thing, as evidenced by the 60%+ vote in Russia, and the 50-49 vote in Venezuela.

Despite the claims or organizations like the OECD that Putin’s election was unprecedented in its anti-Democratic nature, it was pretty typical of elections since the fall of the USSR.

The balloting was reasonably fraud free, but the campaign neither free nor fair.

This pretty much reflects what happened under Yeltsin too. There were suspicious deaths of reporters in both regimes, the state had near absolute control over the mass media and the economy (through cronyism with Yeltsin, and more directly by the state with Putin), dissidents were harassed (Yeltsin with his staging an armed assault on the legislature was worse here), and so generally the results have never met Western standards.

The big difference, and the reason that the support for Putin is to a large degree real, is that people are getting paid for the work that they do, they are getting their pensions, and the rampant corruption has been reduced.

The so-called reformers instituted a system of klepto-capitalism following the fall of the Soviet Union. They believed, largely as a result of Western economic theory that shock therapy transition to free trade would benefit everyone, which did not work in Chile in the 1970s under Pinochet, in Russia in the 1990s, and in Iraq today.

Notwithstanding the generally anti-democratic bent of Putin and his allies, the vote does actually reflect what the Russian people want, or at least what the ethnic Russians, want right now.

Hugo Chavez's loss is I think generally good news.

While I think that he is better than the alternative, the ruling classes in Venezuela whose real differences come down to which side gets to loot the country on any given year, the idea that he the electorate, albeit by a slim margin, has told him that term limits will apply to him is a good thing.

Among other things, this will provide more impetus for him to spend more time on real changes to make Venezuela a more egalitarian country, and less or rhetoric, as his rule now has an expiration date, even if he, as is likely, remains the power behind whoever succeeds him as president.

This also gives us an opportunity to see how profoundly anti-democratic Chavez is. While it’s clear that he is not what one would call a small-d democrat in Western society, this will give us an opportunity to see how far removed from this he actually is.

My guess is that he is somewhere between Bush and His Evil Minions^™ and Howard Dean.