• Tuukka R@sopuli.xyz
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      1 day ago

      Well, for that there are other ways as well. Elections are for making decisions. Popularity can be polled in easier ways as well.

      But what I asked was why is it relevant that Zelensky won’t stay president very long of he somehow loses his support among the people? It’s a self-clarity, so I was interested in knowing why you chose to mention that.

      • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        Popularity can be polled in easier ways as well.

        Unless you’re included in the sample group, your stance isn’t being counted. Polling is great for gauging sentiment between cycles, but if you’re not actually doing a fully election poll, you’re effectively empowering the pollsters to set the policy (implicitly or explicitly) based on their weights and biases. Frank Luntz can, pretty famously, bend his polling group into a pretzel when he puts his mind to it.

        I was interested in knowing why you chose to mention that.

        He’s the head of the government right now. He has the most to gain by postponing elections indefinitely.

        • Tuukka R@sopuli.xyz
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          1 day ago

          Probably he does, but at the moment his support is strong enough by enough of margin that it’s clear he’d win an election anyway if it was held now, so this is kind of moot.

          (And then he’d be the president for the next half a decade, which might be already right after the end of the war no longer what the people in Ukraine want)

          I think it’s a bit of a stupid rule to have in your constitution, and I think it was probably written before 2014 when Ukraine stepped into democracy (or even before 2008, when it started seriously heading towards proper democracy). But as bad as I find the rule, it’s currently in the constitution and wasn’t added by Zelensky.

          It does make sense that at a time like this you do live according to the constitution. Organizing elections would be against the Ukrainian constitution, and it would be a bigger problem with democracy to break the constitution than it is to postpone an election.

          Especially since in the current situation an election would be massively unrepresentative. (What do you do with a mail-in election when the Russia destroys the whole warehouse where the ballots, or at least the ballots from a whole province, are stored?)