Friday, February 24, 2006

Some parties

There are a lot of parties here vying for seats in the Ukrainian Parliament, the Verkhovna Rada. They have to cross the 3% threshold to be able to have any seats at all. This means they will get 15 seats or they will get nothing. A lot of them will get nothing.

The Green Party is here something I didn't know. They threw green colored eggs in the VR the other day protesting something or other.

There's also a party of Putin here. Could it happen anywhere else?

The pensioners, the retirees, also have their own party.

And there are a lot of others. I may post something on the more interesting ones later.

One thing that's done here that has been done in Russia is that parties often fund opposition parties, that is parties that promote policies that the party doing the funding might not agree with. They do this to bleed the larger opposition party of support and votes.

So if there is a nationalist contingent that has made its home in a larger more diverse party, the opposition might fund a nationalist party to drain that support away. This also serves teh purpose of creating very large straw men to take swings at. Set them up to knock them down. "We are the party to save you from the nationalists that are marching with their fists in the air even as we speak." And they might have been funded by the very people taking aim at them.

It's all political technology as they say here. Uber-spin it might be called.

1 comment:

DLW said...

We shd send Karl Rove into exile in Russia, he'd find a lot of competition/company over there.

The antidote to political technologists is deeper civil society.

Life/politics is too complicated and no ones got their hands clean and so it's easy to use simple rules that can be abused, but someone's gotta help mediate the critical information and weed out the pure spin.

Hopefully, the blogospher will help with this...

dlw
dlw