“‘I always wanted successes in the near term, and with experience I’ve come to the conclusion that real successes need 25 years,’ he says. ‘Take a country like Ukraine: it had a number of revolutions, and they each failed, and now you had a free and fair election,’ he says …

In the 2004 Ukrainian election, exit polls conducted by a Soros foundation showed a very different result to the official count, and Viktor Yanukovych, who had ‘won’ the first vote, was forced to concede. He came back to power in 2010, before being toppled amid violent clashes in 2014.

These revolutions, Soros says, were inevitable but not sufficient. ‘Dictators, if they are successful, always go too far, because there are no checks and balances to stop them… The point comes where people who have been cowed into obedience rebel, and there’s a revolution. Revolutions generally don’t succeed. You need to develop institutions, which is what open societies are all about.’ In the past, Putin has blamed Soros for sparking unrest – something he denies, but in a qualified manner that would hardly reassure the Russian president. ‘It was the people of the country who rebelled,’ he says. ‘And I enabled them to do it by various steps that the foundations took, like reliable exit polls.’ It is this approach that has so exercised his critics: few authoritarians would feel threatened by the distribution of mosquito nets or emergency food supplies; but the funding of critical media, legal aid NGOs and minority rights advocacy groups is a different matter.”

aus: George Soros: ‘Brexit hurts both sides – my money was used to educate the British public’ Interviewed durch Shaun Walker, The Guardian online, 2.11.19, im Internet

Abb.: Mounir Fatmi: The lost springs, 2011, im Internet.

 

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