Here’s why there’s a Western media blackout about Russia’s parliamentary elections

With Russian State Duma elections only three days away, part of me is puzzled as to why western media, so hungry for a Russian hit piece when there’s no celebrity to scandalise or natural disaster to pretend to care about, has remained almost totally silent about them.

There are several reasons.

–Because Russia’s elections will be free and fair, they cannot come out with ‘rigged Russian election days away’.

–Of course they could always lie about the nature of the elections like they often do about Russia. However in spite of the faltering establishment in politics and old media clinging  on to their ‘everything bad in the world is Putin’s fault’ meme, amongst the wider public rapprochement with Russia is in the air.

Many recent world developments have proved that Russia cannot be faulted for the crime of running a successful independent state. Also, helping to restore peace in the Middle East has won Russia affection from many who otherwise don’t pay attention to any stories about Russia, be they the true ones or the lies).

–Finally and most importantly. Contented countries have boring elections.

Throughout modern electoral history important elections are generally ones that come during a time of turbulence, not during times of stability and broad contentment.

Take for example the British election of 1945. That election was long delayed due to the outbreak of the Second World War.  When the time came to settle Britain’s post-war Parliamentary fate, the choice was made in favour of the Labour party’s programme of socialism in spite of the fact that the Conservative leader was the war hero Winston Churchill.

In the late 1970s, with Britain’s economy in tatters, another contentious election was held. This time Thatcher’s neo-liberal Conservative party won the election, one whose outcome remains controversial in Britain to this day.

Other examples of ‘exciting’ elections due to political instability include the 1993 Russian State Duma elections, where Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s LDPR won massively in a vote which was effectively on a referendum on Boris Yeltin’s constitutional crisis aka power grab earlier that year. 

Since 1993 the tables of stability have turned. Britain now has a constitutional crisis of her own due to Brexit whilst the US is facing the most confrontational presidential election in its recent memory.

Russia on the other hand is stable. The trouble-makers of the 1990s have faded into political oblivion and the parties that will either retain or expand their vote shares vis-à-vis the previous elections held in 2011 are those led by familiar faces with political programmes that all promote different versions of stability within Russia’s existing political framework.

By contrast many familiar political faces in the West have either left (David Cameron), or are about to leave (Barack Obama), or don’t stand much chance of winning any further elections (Angela Merkel and Francois Holland).

Meanwhile the leaders of Russia’s four main parties are former President Dimitry Medvedev (United Russia), the leader of both the USSR’s and Russia’s first official opposition party, Vladimir Zhirinovsky (LDRP), the prolific Gennady Zyuganov, who has led the Communist Party of Russia since 1993, and the comparative spring chicken Sergey Mironov, who has led ‘A Just Russia’ for a mere 10 years.

In other-words the election will be predictable because the political climate is stable.

It will still be interesting to see if sanctions will boost communist support as the party that has long called for economic self-reliance, or if by the same token they will boost the LDPR, whose foreign policy warnings of the past have now become geo-political fact, making an increase in the LPDR vote a kind of silent referendum on a strong Russian defence against global threats.  However these issues are not big ticket items in the international media.

Nevertheless I am still surprised and a bit disappointed at the lacklustre lies coming from the West.

Whilst the Western media cannot be relied on for news, it does occasionally provide a good source of inspiration for some comic relief.  Is the implication from CNN, the BBC and others that Putin is so busy rigging the US election that he has forgotten to rig his own?  Perhaps he was too busy rigging the Brexit vote to have the time?  Or may be he finds that hacking into Hillary Clinton’s emails is more fun than hacking into Gennady Zyuganov’s collection of photos of Lenin monuments?

No! The true answer was predicted – with amazing foresight – by Peter Lavelle in a recent piece about Hillary Clinton. The reason the West has not been able to put out stories about Putin rigging the Russian election is because Putin is too busy helping to poison Hillary Clinton so that his double-agent Donald Trump from the New York Oblast can conspire to bring the world to the brink of peace!

One can’t help but laugh at the crazed lies and odd omissions in the Western media. Russia is just too stable to make the elections in one of the world’s largest and most important countries newsworthy. But the good news for the West is that if they want political uncertainty, scandal, lies and rigged elections, they only need to open their front door.