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.
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.
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.
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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 -
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.
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.