Who is the third from the left?PS: Sorry that was politically incorrect, let me rephrase my question: Who is the second from the far right?
Keir Starmer, aka Kid Starver and Kiev Sturmer
Aka Queer Harmer
To be fair, they’re (understandably) under martial law which has been extended in 90 day increments since 2022 with parliamentary approval. Elections aren’t to be held under martial law per Ukranian law, and there have been
referendavotes held among the Rada to determine if elections should be held, which failed.Edit: referendum would entail direct democracy. That isn’t what happened - it was just a vote by the legislature.
I would buy this if westerners applied the same nuance to states under imperialist siege, but of course they never have that nuance.
I agree that the situation isn’t treated with nuance, typically, by westerners. But in this case, this is neither particularly nuanced nor naïve - it’s just a statement of fact that the parliament has voted repeatedly to extend martial law.
That doesn’t mean Ukraine is a super-democratic country. It only means that it is the case that the government, made up of elected representatives (and yes, Ukraine banned 11 political parties for alleged Russian ties - one of them with ~10% of parliamentary seats - so the representativeness of the legislature is certainly debatable) has voted to not allow presidential elections until the war is over.
Obviously it’d take a much longer explanation to capture all of the relevant geopolitical context, but this is a factually accurate statement about what is happening, yes?
Let me get this right, they purged the opposition and afterwards vote to mantain power? 😅
They purged roughly 10% - 12% of the opposition by parliament seats, yeah - that means it is at least that much less democratic. I’m just stating facts here. This isn’t a strong defense of the democratic values of Ukraine, just a statement that they aren’t wholly undemocratic as suggested in the meme - it’s misleading.
And the bit where they criminalised over ten opposition parties?
there have been referenda to determine if elections should be held
??? I can’t find evidence of any such referenda. This seems to just be false. Do you just mean ‘survey’?
I am (and most people are) not saying Ukraine MUST hold elections tomorrow. But the meme’s point stands - that none of these people have a meaningful democratic mandate.
Referendum was incorrect. It was just a vote by the legislature, so elected representatives. I had seen Referendum used in some source, but I forget where.
On 26 February 2025, after a previous failed vote on a similar resolution,[27] the Verkhovna Rada passed a resolution reaffirming that elections should not be held during martial law, and also pledged to hold a presidential election upon the conclusion of the Russo-Ukrainian War.[28] On 6 March 2025 opposition politicians Petro Poroshenko and Yulia Tymoshenko, after having confirmed that they had held discussions with United States representatives, confirmed that they still opposed elections held during wartime.[29]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next_Ukrainian_presidential_election
On 6 March 2025 opposition politicians Petro Poroshenko and Yulia Tymoshenko, after having confirmed that they had held discussions with United States representatives, confirmed that they still opposed elections held during wartime.
So democratic, much liberty.
So elected representatives decided that further elections are not necessary, and in the country where opposition is banned, hmm, indeed a democracy to behold.
I mean, banning most of the opposition parties certainly helps getting the cooperation of the remaining ones.
Genuine questions:
Was he seemingly fairly elected originally, and did he hold elections previously? (I don’t know how Ukrainian elections work or how long he was in office before 2022)
How “in control” is he of the parliament / the referenda determining elections? Is it a Trump situation where all his buddies are in position to say, “sure! give him all the power!”, or is there more separation?
I’m admittedly relatively uninformed in the conflict, but I will say it was interesting seeing the general opinion of Lemmy go from “Slava Ukraini, fuck Russian Nazis, here’s some footage of Russian teenagers getting blown up with drones, Trump bad for not wanting to give aid” to “Zelensky is a fascist war criminal and also a Nazi and dumb American liberals are bad for siding with them” seemingly overnight. The switch happened a while ago but it was apparently unanimous.
the general opinion of Lemmy go from “Slava Ukraini, fuck Russian Nazis, here’s some footage of Russian teenagers getting blown up with drones, Trump bad for not wanting to give aid” to “Zelensky is a fascist war criminal and also a Nazi and dumb American liberals are bad for siding with them” seemingly overnight. The switch happened a while ago but it was apparently unanimous.
Lemmy has always had people who took the second position, and still has people who take the first position. There has been a general shift, but it was neither sudden nor unanimous.
When I first joined Lemmy, those that held the second opinion were down voted en masse and we’re always lambasted as Russian trolls and Nazi sympathizers. I never saw a pro Russia / anti Ukraine post or comment with positive votes. Nowadays I don’t think I see many explicitly “pro Russia” posts but there’s a good number of anti Ukraine posts that are relatively high on the front page, and most pro Ukraine comments have at least one upvoted reply calling them a liberal or pro-fascist.
I didn’t necessarily mean unanimous as in, “everyone now has this opinion”, so much as “the hive mind has decided that we now upvote this opinion and down vote that one”. Like, there’s Trump supporters on Lemmy, whenever they comment anything pro-Trump it’s kind of a given (not necessarily saying a good one) that it’s going to get downvoted, and most things critical of him will get upvoted even if it’s not the most accurate or ingenuous criticism. To me, it very much seemed like one week it was “upvote Ukraine, downvote Russia!”, and the next it was “downvote Ukraine, Russia…🤷🏽♂️!”. Somewhere around the Iran shitshow.
Might just be a matter of what coms you’re reading
Zelensky was fairly elected because his platform was peace with Russia and he had strong messaging about how Russians and Ukrainians are brotherly nations. Of course he then immediately dropped the pretense the moment he got elected and started passing anti-Russian laws.
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starting with the annexation of Crimea in 2014
That is the ukrainian october 7
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The communists have been on Lemmy since the beginning.
Of course it is, liberal vanity and solipsism means you cannot possibly countenance the prospect of an actual person disagreeing with you unless money has changed hands.
My assumption is that the NATO/nafo psyops teams utilize reddit and communities like .world and have been influencing opinions, the same as they have previously on Facebook.
Yes, because you’re an extremist who can’t imagine anyone genuinely disagreeing with you
Hahahaha
It would be naive to believe otherwise. Stay vigilant, and disconnect when you can. This shit is poison
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Um, excuse me I have a note saying I’m exempt from doing democracy right now
It’s just a bourgeois democracy.
Democracy is when the majority of voters hate the government and the greater that majority is the more democratic it is.
I have seen this said unironically.
those are leaders of the free and democratic world right there . also why cant zelnsky dress normal
his image advisor has no idea what to do after getting blasted by trump for not wearing a suit so now he’s trying to compensate with these ones.
he’s a method actor
why cant zelnsky dress normal
He went to the leaders of the free world store without realizing they cater to giants, which he is not
How is Trump doing better than them?!!!
he’s not
Have you seen the average yank
i am the average yank. lol
Because Trump at least appeals to the feral hog demographic, as opposed to going out of his way to disappoint everyone
Coalitions? Also not sure how Kid Starver’s number is calculated, labour does have house majority.
multi party system, you get all the shades / 32bit if you like 🙌🏻. two party system result in us vs them (see US), only black and white / 1bit system.
Ah, so the abysmal approval ratings are because other parties exist!
And the reason they haven’t had an elections is because they don’t want this guy to be in charge?
I wonder if I’ll be down voted?
My favorite trope is how libs will inevitably start screeching about Russia when faced with the fact that their ideology is midwifing fascism.
Maybe i can think your meme is dumb while also agreeing that the people pictured are libs that I don’t like. I just don’t like dishonesty and your meme is just a dishonest smear instead of something with legitimate or logical basis. You’re crowing about how societies self-govern while under invasion and idk how anyone other than fellow leftists are supposed to glean any meaning from this. How would your society select its leaders and continue to operate under such circumstances? I’m noticing the lack of any ideas being expressed here other than “liberals bad”, which we all already know. This meme is just a lazy preach-to-the-choir meme and a waste of your propaganda efforts, really.
The only dishonesty here is in your own comment. We know what alternative systems to liberalism are, and there existing socialist states today. Pretending like nothing better is possible and nobody is offering any alternatives is the height of dishonesty.
This totally makes sense if we consider the fact that many westerners don’t consider nonwesterners to be people.
Colonizers can’t choose the presidents of sovereign nations anymore, the people there do the choosing now, and that makes the colonizers furious.
140% of the people choose Putin every time
Why make up obvious lies? Truth not in your favor?
Did putin pay you to say that
I wish Putin paid me to roast imperialists on Lemmy, sigh.
Do you really, genuinely believe that 140% bullshit?
What difference does it make? Also why are we still caring about what Westerners think? Most of them dont care about resisting capitalism, and the ones that do, don’t really want to eradicate it. They just want a bigger slice of the imperialism pie.
Let their countries implode and let them fade into irrelevance
Genuine psychosis at this point
I’m confused by the comment? Putin is trying to colonize Ukraine. Putin mad because they had a free election to elect the person who is holding his own against an ageing wana be world power in a war going on for years that was supposed to be over in days. Also Putin rig’s his own elections so him demanding is bit well, fix your own shit before you fix someone else. Oh wait Putin does fix his own elections.
The Russian Federation is not trying to colonize Ukraine. Their goal is NATO neutrality, and annexation of the four oblasts, which are largely pro-Russian. This is a response to the ethnic repressions against Russians in the Donbass following the coup of Yanukovych in 2014, and the ensuing secession of Donetsk and Luhansk and the civil war that followed.
The war was never supposed to be over in days. This was circulated as a means to humiliate Russia, but all talks of an attack lasting days either came from many years before 2022, or from the west.
As for Putin rigging elections, this might be true, but we also know that he is legitimately popular in Russia. The nationalists are most popular, followed by the communists. The pro-western liberals like Navalny was are in the minority and have no real support base.
This goes against my current view of the situation. The NATO expansion is somewhat understandable, not enough for a war perhaps, but unsure.
Care to point me in the direction to read more about this?
What in particular do you question? It’s a complex and ongoing subject, so there’s no one-stop shop for it. The closest I can do is point you to threads like this one.
Thanks, exactly what I was looking for! 😄 As a Norwegian pretty much everyone sides with Ukraine, and I have not really challenged that view for myself. I have just accepted the narrative “Russia = imperialistic & bad. Ukraine = democracy & good”. So it’s probably a good idea to try to understand it
Understandable! It’s one of the more difficult topics for westerners like us to grasp, and it took me some time to come around to the ML consensus on the Russian Federation (ie, it isn’t imperialist if we accept Lenin’s analysis, and actually is anti imperialist even if run by bourgeois oligarchs).
Good on you for being open to non-western propaganda sources. Curiosity seems to be mostly dead in the lemmy liberal scene.
Wow, it’s like I’m on reddit all over again. Propaganda hits hard.
Can you elaborate? Since when did Reddit have a sizable communist userbase?
I said the absolute contrary. There’s nothing communist about Russia nowadays. It’s as capitalist as it gets.
Of course Russia is no longer socialist. My point is that what I said is the standard communist stance on the Russian Federation, that of critical support.
No way!!! No one told us!!!
You are the master of fractal wrongness.
You’re overthinking it, my comment was purely about the picture you posted
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You’re saying that of they held an election, people would either vote for Putin or someone that is pro Russia? I thought Ukraine was united against him…
I wasn’t aware that intergalactic law required all elections to include Vladimir Putin on the ballot. And are you suggesting everybody would vote for him if he was an option?
I’m so tired of doing a poll at work for where to get lunch and Putin winning.
He does make a good borscht.
Yes, I think they are trying to say people would vote pro-russian (which they did, hence the maidan coup), but Putin bad because no democracy, so therefore Ukraine had to get rid of democracy, to save democracy. Perfectly good lib logic.
whataboutism
Putin was chosen by Russian oligarchs after the second sovereign default in 10 years.
He used to carry luggage for the mayor of St Petersburg, Sobchak.
An Islamic caliphate started a civil war in the South of Russia before he was chosen, this is why Russian oligarchs needed a man with a military backgound.
Putin is Democratic or what.
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We already understand that, the point is that bourgeois democracy is a farce, as it leads to deeply unpopular figures getting elected. Socialist democracy is necessary.
With these numbers, they should be holding new elections.
Though I do agree,
the opinion numbers should be put side at side with election numbers
to showcase how little these politicians care about approval rates once in power.
At least he isnt winning at the polls with 140% of the vote
He’s not winning at the polls at all!
Actually, in a multi party system, it is. If you only have two, or one political flavour you’ll get different results.
The number of parties has fuck all to do with how democratic a particular system is. It’s whose interests the parties represent that matters. In capitalist societies, parties serve the interests of the ruling capital owning class, and the working majority simply gets to pick which member of the exploiting class will rule over them and repress them.
The number of parties influences the percentual result.
You could say that in a 51/49 outcome 49% of the people isn’t represented but it’s still democratic.
I’m Belgian. We hold the world record in government foundations. I know how small percentages work and am pretty sure it’s democracy at work.
Do I like it? Not really, but it still democracy.
Pluralism has nothing to do with whether or not the will of the people is accurately reflected. One party states often have higher democratic representation because the people can more directly influence policy.
Last elections in Poland seen a whooping 17 parties and over 40 independents elected to sejm. However, you could not find a single socialist among them, not to mention communist, all 17 parties and over 40 independents are representing various flavours of liberalism
Excellent point to make. Pluralism isn’t bad in every case, though it can lead to factionalism of course, but the idea that it’s democratic itself is horribly wrong.
Sure. But, the Polish people seem to be happy with a far right representation.
I really don’t care about left or right. I’ve been working with politicians the last 15 years and I’ve met socialist people on the far right and extremely liberal people on the left. The boring centrist seem to get it right more often but they don’t get elected.
I’ve met socialist people on the far right
You make no sense. Please elaborate.
Democracy is a compromise. The irony is that by representing everybody partially you’ll never represent anyone fully.
Democracy is rule by the majority, which really means in practice a country where the working classes are in control. Bourgeois “democracy” guises capitalist control in a cloak of electoralism, obscuring unpopular candidates with positive wins in the realm of capitalist controlled elections.
Dude, half of my country has been ruled by elected socialist for 70 years now. Socialists have been part of the federal government since the 2nd World War and in their prime they formed a purple government together with the liberals.
Our most liberal party is struggling to get enough votes to participate in tge elections. What you’re on about?
PTB has a decent and growing foothold in Belgium, which is fantastic, but that’s about as good as it gets in bourgeois democracy, and speaks more to the effectiveness of parties like the PTB than the effectiveness of bourgeois democracy.
