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Following Sunday’s rigorously managed and largely predetermined election, Russian President Vladimir Putin has been reelected with almost 88 % of the vote. With years of authorized and administrative harassment having weeded out any actual rivals to Putin, leaving solely token challengers, the end result got here as little shock. Hundreds of Russian voters lined up at polling stations precisely at midday to take part in a symbolic present of defiance often known as “Midday Towards Putin,” whereas others sought to precise their assist for just lately deceased opposition chief Alexei Navalny by writing his title on their voting slips or visiting his grave in Moscow to symbolically solid their vote for him. The election was condemned as unfair and undemocratic by an extended roster of Western governments, whereas China, India, and North Korea provided Putin their congratulations.
There is a sense of humour to be discovered on Weibo immediately at Putin main within the polls within the Russian presidential election.
“I 100% consider it”
“I 200% consider it”
“What’s up with the remaining 12.85%, are they spies? They need to verify that out.” pic.twitter.com/xuiKqg4k64— Kerry Allen 凯丽 (@kerrya11en) March 18, 2024
A lot of the Russian election protection on Weibo was laudatory, with many verified customers posting fulsome reward, however there have been some dissenting voices—together with this Weibo remark archived by CDT editors:
“Nonetheless inferior to a sure somebody who was reelected unanimously.”
– Remark from Weibo person 我的名字叫做_an, jocularly evaluating the information that Russian President Vladimir Putin had been reelected with almost 88 % of the vote to Xi Jinping’s 2023 unanimous and uncontested “reelection.” [Chinese]
In March 2023, China’s rubber-stamp Nationwide Folks’s Congress unanimously reelected Xi Jinping to a 3rd five-year time period as President. (His third time period as Normal Secretary had already been confirmed the earlier October on the twentieth Get together Congress.) The vote was 2952 for, none towards, and none abstaining. Xi’s appointment to an unprecedented third time period as president was made potential by 2018 revisions to the Chinese language structure that repealed time period limits adopted after the Cultural Revolution. The whole course of was so contentious that there was a notable improve in on-line censorship designed to quash dialogue of the unanimous vote. For instance, Weibo searches for the hashtag #2952#, the variety of votes Xi received, had been initially blocked and later restricted to outcomes from verified state- and Get together-affiliated accounts. Weibo searches for the time period, “the Folks’s alternative,” which Get together shops used to rejoice Xi’s election, equally solely returned outcomes from verified accounts. Get together mouthpiece Folks’s Every day even censored its personal 2011 essay through which it had warned: “If the folks’s will continues to be hijacked by ‘unanimous elections,’ it would gas public resentment.” Xi’s reelection, praised by state media as one other triumph for China’s “entire course of democracy,” was characterised by precisely the kind of extensively derided unanimous elections (全票当选, quánpiào dāngxuǎn) that Xi Jinping himself had warned against in 2003.
Alexander Boyd contributed to this put up.
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