My Mother tells a foreign journalist it is the lowest she has seen me. I’m living in a rented apartment with a companion, barely able to see my children and my bank accounts are frozen. A political movement, who pretend to be anti-corruption but they’re the same insiders as me, ask me to join. I’m not sure what they want to do. One head guy is a former PM of the country, the other makes my own weaknesses look like playschool. However, I’ve no concrete source of income now as the fund we set up has run dry. Whistleblowers are reluctant to contact us and officially I’m a pariah. And then it happens. What we tried to do here, happens next door. With funding from America, Britain and loads of European countries, the citizens kick out the President and take over. There is a catch.
Some of my old friends from the darker fringe of society are there too. I have to support the ‘democratisation’ of the place, but those taking over are no friends of my people. In fact they’re inacting laws to hammer and discriminate against my people in their country. I play both sides until my government take back part of the neighbour’s land that was ours all along, I say this, I can’t hide my true feelings. I don’t like our leaders, though what they did makes sense. Some of my foreign fans are unhappy, but I’m a patriot. I’m uneasy with one of my political partners and taking the stand with him is not easy. He is mixed up with worse elements than I could ever dream of so it’s no surprise, I tell media, when he is shot dead. I also say that this could be extremists from next door, given that he both argued for and against our nation’s involvement with our neighbour. His latest girlfriend was from there and he had been warned, in my presence, that being involved with a child 30 years his junior would open him up to ridicule. I didn’t like him as much as the US Ambassador, who thought that he would be the most logical choice for a real opposition candidate. His weaknesses undid him, I tell friends. He never cared, until it was too late. His removal from the scene opened up a path for me to lead the party….until it didn’t.
The former PM kept control of the party, but even with businessmen putting money into it nothing of real note happened. As part of the deal not to contest leadership my legal issues were ‘frozen’ and I’d to keep my nose clean. I did some travel outside the country, said the right things to keep former and potential future foreign funders happy. With no chance to run legally in the 2016 parliament elections and time ticking before the 2018 Presidential election, I called up my former academic advisor, who was now back in the American academic world. They’d a new President too and he wasn’t keen to get involved in the mess our country was portrayed as. After a lot of pushing we got some cash for media articles and The Economist were one of the first to call me the “only viable opponent”. European money started to flow back in and before Christmas I announced I was running for the top job. I’d been warned by lots of people to step back, let a new generation take charge. Charge of what? It was my time.
Suddenly the charges frozen were unfrozen and I fought back by activating the kids I cultivated earlier with ‘anti-corruption’ marches across the country. Some journalists laughed about it. Me continuing to keep up the facade of being anti something I had benefited from. Still, I had a last throw of this dice. Best thing was that in London, Prague, Basel and Bonn there were mini-marches in support. Even with this, support at home was minimal. No matter what stunt was pulled, no matter what pressure I was under, nobody cared. I even got my wife to help out with rallies and zero, nothing. Nobody cared. Even when I called for civil disobedience to create a situation like our neighbour had 3 year previous, nobody bothered. Some kids reacted, but nobody of any worth. The more the ‘international community’ complained I was being oppressed, the more the local audience laughed at me.
I was not allowed run for President and that was the last straw. I called for protests and nothing, zero. I called for a boycott, with foreign media lauding me. Nobody seemed to care that I was proposing deportation of darker skinned immigrants, formalising the piece of our neighbour we’d taken back. And that we were European, just that. I spent almost 2 years campaigning yet less than 5% of the people would vote for me. Being kept off the ballot kept my brand alive. Getting 4-10% of the vote in an election would be shameful. I went back to the youth again, they’d be the ones who would fight my battles. Not the old farts who didn’t like my politics.
Back online I was in my element. Social media meant I could talk from wherever and nobody would bother me. An American Embassy advisor gave me a plan to help with skewing the local elections. I got the youngsters out making their TikTok videos as police were briefly detaining them. It didn’t last long as their parents, schools, universities and employers punished them. I unveiled ‘my’ voting plan and when it caused genuine opposition candidates to lose, I blamed the voters. I did get one win. The wife of my former academic advisor was defeated and that made me happy. I wasn’t finished with her yet.
Having begun the year badly, I accused a food company of giving children dysentry which was an absolute lie and was found guilty in court for it. Compliant foreign media said it was a witch hunt and said i’d changed the course of recent elections - I hadn’t, but hey, who cared. Money rolled in and I found myself a new partner who actually made life interesting. We were spotted at a nice cafe in the capital city, though I was able to pull the story out and even the local government-run news agency let it slide. Privacy and all that. I mean, I’d not given it much thought when alleging my President had lovers and children with those lovers, nor had I thought of his family when I told a British journalist that he had cancer. He didn’t, though it looked good and even got published - without my name attached but in our interview.
I and my team set out our plan for the year. In March I would visit the land taken from our neighbour and had planned a fiery speech to demand a new vote on the future of the territory. It made sense because I needed to drum up support from America and Europe, the foreign donors approved the plan and budget. My team applied for the permit and were told we could hold it in a seaside town which would be pretty quiet at the time. My eldest child got her place at the same university I spent a year in. The former Ambassador made it happen with a full ride scholarship, a real win. My wife, with whom I am still on good terms, was relieved too as our child was struggling in school. As we joked over Whatsapp messages - “With her grades we might have to pay for her education at a shitty college in Russia.” A year before I told my anti-corrupion fund’s legal director to reach out to my former academic advisor’s wife and see would she give my child a free place in her university. It would be against EVERYTHING I’d said about Russian education, but paying for my kids to study abroad would be insane.
Early in January I’m on the fund-raising roadshow, the shell companies we opened in Germany, Dubai and 2 other European nations are having their coffers filled. Despite that my financial advisor told me I need to settle court cases quickly and back down on some claims or I’ll be bankrupt. At the end of January I reach out to one offended party and he tells me that unless I admit I was fooled by a whistleblower, he’s enforcing the court judgement. He then tells me that the whistleblower was in fact….him! This guy is up to his neck in all sorts and friends with the President. He gets all the cushy jobs, contracts and basically is a court insider. I tell him where to go.
I announce plans for marches in March in the capital city, telling people that we will protest every day at the criminal gang in power. A local newspaper runs a story of how I’m down to my last million dollars and have sold a property in the capital and one in Spain. I respond in a blog that it’s government agitation. Anyway, the apartment was in Italy and I didn’t sell it, my wife rented it to a couple she knows. On the topic of my wife, she met a nice guy and while it was initially disturbing and I had a difficult few days of thinking (drinking), fair is fair. We agreed to keep things quiet and that she won’t bring him to the family apartment, last thing we need is media on our necks.
Then it happens. An event that wipes out my plans and absolutely drains my bank accounts. This virus that began in China, a lab-created one if my contacts are to be believed, spreads all over and the world shuts down. My partner catches it early and is hospitalised from our rented apartment in the city centre. A “liberal” website publishes a story and says she is my daughter, the article is taken down within hours and we say it is my daughter and ask for privacy. Nobody cops that their hair colours are different. It’s beyound infuriating. My foreign donors tell me the next tranche of funds is stopped. The former Ambassador tells me not to worry, he’s still rooting for me. My team tell me to go fully live online. I’m not convinced and then realise, it can work.
I have my show which is pre-recorded, but called live, and I offer a range of ideas and theses. This pandemic is being used to trap us. Vaccines are evil. Break the lockdown rules, don’t listen to them. If there is mass disobedience, how can they arrest us all. Naturally, myself, my partner, family, colleagues don’t break lockdown rules, but there are some who do. There are some really unbalanced youngsters, especially, who are directionless. The kids we need to target are furious at being locked inside and so, we go full on. We advise them on what to do. Make your protest, but make sure someone else is filming. Make sure it is uploaded right away and we’ll spread the word. And Telegram is excellent for it, until they realise they’re fully involved in criminality and start clamping down. It begins to work a treat and my mini-martyrs are arrested, thrown out of university dorms and one even allows me to skewer my former academic advisor’s wife. Her takedown is sublime and I convince the world that she is dumb, intelligent, evil and naive at the same time - with nobody noticing the gaps in logic, or fact. But by the time lockdowns are lifted people are tired of me, viewing numbers have dropped and donations dried up. Luckily foreign media have wilfully ignored my race-based conspiracies, outlandish claims and disturbing lack of consistency.
It’s time to take this show on the road, except….nobody in the government seems to give a damn. Nobody has listened to me over the referendum. Nobody cares. I’ve not been sleeping, eating right and the tablets I use to get through the day are having less and less of an effect. Something needs to be done, my donors say, but what?