by Bill Eddy
than two consecutive terms. Putin served two such terms from 2000 through
2008. He was succeeded by Dmitri Medvedev, who immediately appointed
Putin prime minister.
At the end of Medvedev’s term, Putin decided to run again for presi-
dent. By November 2011, polls showed that he had only 34-percent support
from likely voters. After he announced he would run again, many people
were outraged. In December 2011, his party (United Russia) did poorly com-
pared to expectations in the parliamentary elections but they still somehow
won the most votes. Clear evidence that the election had been manipulated
brought hundreds of thousands into the streets, more than at any time since
the Soviet Union collapse in 1991.
Putin’s first reaction to these Russian demonstrators was anger. In his mind,
he had made these young professionals rich, and now they had turned
against him. Even his former finance minister, Alexei Kudrin, attended one
of these demonstrations. That was betrayal. Putin’s second reaction was
fear. He and his team were surprised by the size of the protests. Never
before had so many Russians demonstrated against his rule. The message
from the streets quickly turned radical, starting with outrage against falsi-
fication, but morphing into demands for the end of Putin’s regime. 154
So Putin decided to use Hillary Clinton and George Soros, in addi-
tion to McFaul, as his targets in the lead- up to the March 2012 election.
At the time, even Russian President Medvedev personally told McFaul
that things would calm down after the election.155 But as we have seen
before, such tactics work; Putin went on from only 34-percent support in
December to win the election in March. Then he cracked down further
on dissent.156
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High- Emotion Media
From his first year as president in 2000, Putin has been building his authori-
tarian rule by dominating the media. “Putin had acquired de facto control of
Russia’s three largest and most important television channels before the end
of his first year in office. ”157
No meaningful competitors have come up with alternatives to the mes-
sages he wants to give to the nation. Over the years he has made claims of a
“pedophile menace,” “propaganda of homosexuality,” and the West’s “attack”
on Russia’s Christian values and traditions. After so many years of promot-
ing his various fantasy crises on television, he had the majority of the coun-
try behind him in 2012. They knew who their (fantasy) villains were and,
certainly, who their (fantasy) hero was. He taught them well.
When the 2018 elections came around, everyone knew that Putin would
win since no serious opponents were allowed on the ballot. Just prior to
that election, the New York Times ran a story about Putin’s support among
women in Russia and the role that his use of television has with them.
The special relationship between Russian women and Vladimir Putin goes
back to the very beginning of his years in power. In the 2000 elections—
the first time Mr. Putin’s name was on the ballot—61 percent of his votes
came from women and just 39 percent from men. . . . In 2012, 75 percent
of women offered a favorable opinion of Mr. Putin, compared with 69 per-
cent of men, according to the Pew Research Center. . . .
Older women are a particular bastion of support. I spent a week in St.
Petersburg last month and spoke to a dozen older women from different
walks of life, with a variety of income and educational levels. All told me
they were voting for him. Most said they were doing so in part because he
was a good man—strong, healthy and active. . . .
. . . By the time women reach retirement age, their husbands have often
died, and their days consist of taking care of grandchildren, spending time
with other older women and watching television.158 (Emphasis added)
Vladimir Putin appears to be a classic example of a Wannabe King. Once
again, a single person’s personality has made a world of difference and has
ended his nation’s fledgling democracy. This was not inevitable. Yeltsin
almost appointed another man, Boris Nemtsov, in 1999.
Yeltsin might have very well selected Nemtsov as his successor, and the
world might never have heard of Vladimir Putin. . . . He had the skills and
charisma to have become a successful president—a successful democratic
president.159 (Emphasis in original)
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82 Part II: The Fantasy Crisis Triad Worldwide
Hungary: Viktor Orban
Hungary was one of the Warsaw Pact countries that came under the domi-
nation of the Soviet Union after World War II. It had a revolution the Soviet
Union put down in 1956, although it eventually did gain more freedom from
the Soviet Union than most Warsaw Pact nations. It wasn’t until the Soviet
Union started coming apart at the seams in 1989 that Hungary became an
independent, democratic, parliamentary republic.
By 1990, Hungary held its first free parliamentary elections, and by 1991,
all Soviet troops had left Hungary. In 1999, Hungary joined NATO, and in
2004, it joined the European Union. It was with these moves that it pulled
free of Russia and tilted West with strong democratic ties to the United
States and Europe. One of the young student leaders who formed a group to
help launch the pro- democracy movement in the 1980s was Viktor Orban.
Orban’s Early Years
Viktor Orban was born in 1963. He was a country boy who grew up in villages
in Hungary where his father was an agronomist and entrepreneur and his
mother was a speech therapist and special educator. He served two years in
the military and then went to law school. To be admitted to law school, he was
required to join the Communist youth group, so he did and became a leader.
In college, he later rejected Communism and the Communist gov-
ernment in Hungary. He helped form the pro- democracy group that later
became the political party Fidesz. Where there were elections in 1990, his
group won 22 seats in the government. But soon thereafter things changed.
Within two years, however, a battle over Fidesz’s soul would erupt that
showed Orban’s early willingness to change his political ideology in pur-
suit of power. As Hungary’s first post- communist, centre- right govern-
ment struggled against economic collapse, some of the party’s co- founders
wanted to ally with a bigger liberal party. Orban thought Fidesz would be
swallowed up. He wanted to take the party to the right, where he thought
it could become the dominant political force. “Orban said, ‘Our main
enemy is the liberal party. It’s a fight, and we have to win,’” says Fodor.160
High- Conflict Personality
In 2010, Orban and his right- wing Fidesz party were elected to power and
they have dominated Hungary ever since. In the past eight years, Orban
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has put significant effort into dismantling the democracy that elected him.
He individually chose this direction, according to reports of a meeting that
occurred in 2010.
The senior leaders of Fidesz gathered on the banks of the Danube, in a
building known as the Hungarian White House, stunned by the scale of
their good fortune. Their right- wing party had won unexpectedly sweep-
ing political power in national elections. The question was how to use it.
Several men urged caution. But Viktor Orban, the prime minister- elect,
disagreed. The voting result, Mr. Orban continued, had given him the
right to carry out a radical overhaul of the country’s Constitution.161
Since he came to power, he has aggressively moved to rewrite the Hun-
garian Constitution, impose restrictions on civil society, and divert Euro-
pean Union money and federal government money for his own purposes.
He has put restrictions on the Hungarian media, has redrawn electoral maps
to favor his party, and has sought to take control of the judiciary, which was
overruling many of his authoritarian efforts.
Although Hungary was hailed as a democracy after it got out from under
the Soviet Union in the 1990s, Orban has almost single- handedly created
what he calls an “illiberal democracy.” He has made Hungary appear to be a
normal European country, while he has really turned it into a dictatorship.162
Fantasy Crises
Orban claims that Hungarians are victims who are being treated poorly
by the European Union, by immigrants, and especially by George Soros, a
Hungarian- born American.
Fantasy Villain
George Soros is a multibillionaire whose life story has a fascinating arc. As
a young Jewish citizen of Hungary during World War II, he had the misfor-
tune of being a prisoner at a concentration camp. He survived, and after the
war, he moved to the United States and became a wildly successful investor
in the stock market. He also invested in efforts to promote democracy in his
old country and around the world.
Ironically, he has become the Target of Blame for Orban and Fidesz. Turning
Soros into a villain helped Orban win a fourth term as president in March 2018.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, in 1989, [Soros] poured hundreds of millions
of dollars into the former Soviet- bloc countries to promote civil society and
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84 Part II: The Fantasy Crisis Triad Worldwide
liberal democracy. It was a one- man Marshall Plan for Eastern Europe, a
private initiative without historical precedent. . . .
He also finds himself in the unsettling position of being the designated vil-
lain of this anti- globalization backlash, his Judaism and career in finance
rendering him a made- to- order phantasm for reactionaries worldwide.163
(Emphasis added)
Fantasy Hero
Orban and his party are the fantasy heroes—and not just for Hungary.
With national variations, Mr. Orban’s Hungary has been the template
for the “authoritarianization”—the term some experts use—in Jaroslaw
Kaczynski’s Poland, Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey, Vladimir Putin’s
Russia, and in other democracies where populism has made headway. . . .
The populists, no matter how narrowly elected, assume that electoral vic-
tory was the will of the people and, in a terrible irony, a license to trample
on the same democracy that raised them to power.164
Orban and his party are all over billboards, TV, and radio. Orban has gained
much power in Hungary through these antidemocratic efforts, and the Euro-
pean Union has mostly been ineffective at stopping him. Although they hold
the purse strings for a lot of funding that goes to Hungary, they don’t want
to upset the balance of power with the former Eastern European nations that
have become EU members.165
High- Emotion Media
Orban used the immigration crisis of 2015 to get reelected in 2018, even
though he and his government largely ended that problem three years earlier
by placing severe restrictions on who can enter the country.
Immigration was a major focus of the [2018] election, and throughout
the day, state television replayed some of the most dramatic images from
2015, when the crisis of refugees and immigrants flooding into Europe
from the Middle East and Africa was at its peak.166
Fantasy crises can live on for years, when you control state television and the
images it projects.
With his manipulation of the message and restrictions on the press,
he has created the opportunity for his emotional repetition in isolation.
Because the opposition is divided and because he has remapped electoral
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districts, he continues to control the government even though his party got
fewer votes in the most recent election compared to prior years.
Once his party won two- thirds of the seats in Parliament in 2018, it was
positioned to change the Constitution and do whatever it wished to “protect
Hungary. ”167
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The Philippines: Rodrigo Duterte
The Philippines is a nation of 7,000 islands in the South Pacific Ocean. The
United States won control of the Philippines from Spain in 1898 at the end
of the Spanish- American War. The US ruled the Philippines until it was cap-
tured by the Japanese during World War II, from 1942 to 1944; at that point,
the US regained control. In 1946, however, the Philippines became an inde-
pendent nation with a democratic constitution and elections. Since then, it
has also grown rapidly; it had a population of 30 million in 1970 and at the
time of this writing it is over 100 million.
Ferdinand Marcos dominated Filipino politics with martial law and an
iron fist from 1965 to 1986, when he was ousted by the nonviolent “People
Power” movement and fled the country. Thirty years of democratic elections
followed before Rodrigo Duterte came to power.168
Duterte’s Early Years
Rodrigo Duterte was born in 1945. His father was a lawyer and his mother
was a school teacher. They both became involved in politics, his father as a
mayor and then a governor. By high school, Duterte had been kicked out of
two schools for “unruly behavior,” but he ultimately finished at a Catholic
high school.
It was not that he was a bad student. He just enjoyed hanging around
with city toughs and became street- smart, picking up their vocabulary
and mannerism. Although it caused immense trouble during his school
days and earned him severe whipping at home, the experience later helped
him to connect with the masses.169
He subsequently went to law school and became first a prosecutor in
Davao City and then its mayor in 1988. He spent most of the next twenty years
in that office, except for a few years as a congressman from 1998 to 2001.170
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86 Part II: The Fantasy Crisis Triad Worldwide
High- Conflict Personality
Duterte’s success in ruling Davao may give some indications about his per-
sonality. Between 1998 and 2016, death squads in Davao were alleged to have
executed over 1,400 people. Duterte has alternately confirmed and denied
his involvement in these death squads, but we do know that throughout this
time, he held widespread support.
Over two decades, at a time when Davao was doubling in size to over 1.5 mil-
lion, Duterte transformed the city from a Third World hellhole into a pleas-
ant place for a law- abiding person to live—even a business hub. He pulled
this off by mixing wiles and ruthlessness, offering Muslims and Commu-
nists financial incentives to carry their campaigns elsewhere and threatening
them with retribution should they not. Many human rights groups hold him
responsible for about 1,000 unsolved killings during his tenure, carried out
by shadowy assailants who came to be called the Davao Death Squad.171
In 2016, Duterte was elected President of the Philippines, in part because
of his promises to rein in drug trafficking and to reduce the extreme pov-
erty of many in the country. Duterte was able to pull together a coalition of
conservative Filipinos, overseas labor migrants, members of the educated
middle class, urban poor, and informal workers to be elected president.
For his first two years, he maintained a steady approval rating of around
80 percent. His pursuit of his drug war has been a big part of that; it has over
70 percent approval.172
Fantasy Crisis
Duterte has used strong, violent language about the drug problem in the Philip-
pines, but there are questions about the actual size of this problem. It is not clear
that Filipinos actually see drug use as a crisis. A respected poll every year of the
five most concerning problems has never had drug use make the list. People are
concerned about drug dealers, but they would rather suspects be caught alive
and prosecuted than shot down in cold blood in the streets by unidentifiable
marauders on motorcycles (who many believe are actually police).173
Fantasy Villains
Are the villains just drug dealers, or are all drug addicts villains in Duterte’s
mind? He claims that addicts often become dealers, which gives his war a