Lhe autocracies pride themselves on being regimes “effective”, a quality that would be unique to them. Evoking the complexity of the problems of the time, Vladimir Putin puts liberal democracy in the radius of modes of government “obsolete”. Xi Jinping, he judges that the couple Communist Party-“socialism with Chinese characteristics” would be superior to all other forms of governance. Nevertheless: we owe both of these leaders the greatest disasters of the moment.
Even if they are of different proportion and gravity, the war in Ukraine and the mass lockdowns decided in China are products of autocracy. Not that democracies haven’t caused their share of historical disasters: they have their criminal records. But the war of aggression in Ukraine and the Chinese policy of zero Covid are intimately linked to the nature of the regimes in place in Moscow and Beijing. Or, more accurately, these dramas reflect the fantasies of Putin and the hubris of Xi Jinping – both practicing aggressive nationalism and smothering any unpleasant factual truth.
In Moscow and Beijing, the facts must bend to the doctrine of the leader. If this is not the case, we do not inform him, for fear of displeasing him. This is the self-blinded despot theorem. Censorship reigns. The information does not circulate or badly. Finally, between truth and lies, the border is erased.
Infernal mechanics
This is to say that, in this “war of models” which opposes autocracies and democracies, the latter would have some merits to assert if only self-flagellation were not their favorite sport. Often given as slow or hesitant, the laborious and messy machinery of liberal democracy has not said its last word – even if it does not form, alas, the unsurpassable horizon of political regimes as we thought at the end of the century. latest.
The war in Ukraine is entering its third month. In Putin’s mind, which his entourage did not dare to contradict, this campaign should not exceed two to three weeks. At the hands of “Nazis” degenerates, the state in kyiv was soon to collapse, while the crowd would welcome with roses, vodka and grains of rice the convoys of armored vehicles descended from the holy mother Russia. A larger “Crimea operation” (annexed by Moscow in 2014).
There are tens of thousands of deaths and destruction such as Europe has not known since the Second World War. Faced with the savagery of Russian aggression, there is the resistance of a people and an army supported by a “Western bloc” revived when it was said to be moribund. Everything was wrong in Putin’s representation of Volodymyr Zelensky’s Ukraine and in his idea of the West. But no institutional checks and balances existed in Moscow to tell the “chief” and even less independent press to warn the Russians. The war has only exacerbated this infernal mechanism: the Putin regime is more dictatorial today than it was yesterday – which announces other catastrophes.
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