ELECTIONS AHEAD
"PUTIN-SAN" ON THE SATIRICAL PUPPET SHOW "KUKLY"
IN THE RUN-UP TO THE 2000
RUSSIAN PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION
With Russian parliamentary elections coming next month, and the presidential election in March 2012 (and Vladimir Putin an announced candidate), the BBC has an informative analysis of some popular pushback to Kremlin media control (here). As Stephen Ennis writes, "TV political satire has been virtually extinct in Russia since the puppet show Kukly ... disappeared from the screens shortly after Mr Putin came to power." The photograph above shows Putin as a martial arts master on "Kukly."
Now there is YouTube: "The videos are in a variety of genres - political polemic, satire and song - but they have one thing in common: a critical or irreverent attitude to the country's leadership - Mr Putin, President Dmitry Medvedev and their party, United Russia." Some of them have had over one million views -- "unprecedented" in "a just a few weeks." (There are sixty million internet users in a population of 140 million plus.)
Putin's negatives are said to be up.
The general law of politics probably still applies: You can't beat somebody with nobody.
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