[radu_floricica]

1. I'm Romanian, and we were a step away from the same mistake. In the 2016 we had two perfectly valid options, but for some reason we ended up with a majority coalition that weeks after elections started to dismantle the democratic state. Cue lots of protests, a few years of back and forth, them voting down their own government for not going far enough... a shitfest. Their leader finally got imprisoned a few years later for corruption charges, but in a way that made it abundantly clear that it was the result of his party losing a popularity vote, and not justice doing its job. tl;dr: we were fking close. And because we were in close to the same place, I can tell that some things we did - voting, freezing our asses off in protests, occasionally eating a mouthful of tear gas - were necessary. Having a mafia leadership doesn't happen overnight. By some accounts, even Putin had to stage fake attacks to make sure people vote for him in the beginning.

2. Yes, actually, to a much much lower degree. There's a huge difference between buying things in the open market and, well, every decision in domestic policy in the last 110 years.

Will read the link, thank you.

[russiano]

We actually tried to do the same thing with a coalition but it didn't work out for a few reasons. Putin is extremely paranoid about regime change (for a good reason) and he is well-prepared. Rumors are he was really going to leave around 2010 but Libya and then US-sponsored revolution in Ukraine made him change his mind

>Yes, actually, to a much much lower degree. There's a huge difference between buying things in the open market and, well, every decision in domestic policy in the last 110 years.

Yes, some of the decisions in domestic policy resulted in stopping your friends in WW2. Sorry for that