Mideasterners Relieved Not To Have Elections In Which Russia Can Interfere

“Those Zionists can keep their democracy. I’m still going to bash them for depriving Palestinians of democracy, though.”

Cairo, October 28 – Citizens and residents of numerous states in the Levant and beyond voiced a sense of having dodged a metaphorical bullet this week, in that their countries employ only the most token institutions and processes of representative democracy, if any, a fact that spares them the tension, divisions, and recriminations that go along with having Vladimir Putin meddle in those processes.

Egyptians, Emiratis, Kuwaitis, Syrians, Jordanians, Libyans, Sudanese, Yemenis, Iranians, Saudi Arabians, and members of numerous other Middle East nationalities confessed in interviews over the last several days their relief that Russia cannot interfere in their countries’ elections, since those elections either do not occur or serve no real function beyond the cosmetic.

“If there’s one thing I’m grateful for, it’s that we don’t have elections in which Putin can interfere,” gushed Bilal Halabi, 32, one of Syria’s millions of internally displaced persons. “I might have been held as a sex slave by various guerrilla factions and suffered physical and emotional anguish that will never heal, but at least I know no operative based in Moscow is manipulating me to vote a certain way that actually matters, or is undermining the integrity of the ballot-counting process.”

“Those Israelis have really got trouble on their hands,” observed Jordanian merchant Nour Jilani. “I can’t imagine having the right to vote in meaningful elections, because that would mean the risk of having that vote subject to someone else influencing me how to vote, and I can’t handle the thought of  the responsibility to make a decision under such circumstances. And then China, or Russia, or whoever, might try to get in the way of an accurate count? Count me out. Those Zionists can keep their democracy.”

“I’m still going to bash them for depriving Palestinians of democracy, though,” she added. “That’s just how it works.”

Representatives of the Putin administration denied involvement in other countries’ electoral affairs. “That’s a Western imperialist slander,” insisted Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergey Lavrov. “The assumption that we would meddle in Middle East countries’ elections bespeaks not just an offensive attitude, but a fundamentally ignorant one. First of all, there’s no way we would tolerate free and fair elections in any of our client states, and second, even if by some bizarre miracle such elections came to be held, decades of propaganda have ensured that we need not lift a finger to ensure an outcome we find acceptable.”

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