ABSTRACT
General Sisi’s successful co-optation and redirection of the Egyptian mass-protest move-
ment is a classic example of such latter day Bonapartist plebiscitarianism. Vladimir
Putin’s propagandist tool kit includes a number of distinctively twenty-first-century
twists on the theme, as in his annual appearance on a nationally broadcast call-in show
as a means of generating the illusion of direct contact with the people, or his retroactive
reference to ‘secretly conducted’ opinion polls in Crimea as a basis for ascribing demo-
cratic legitimacy to the initial, covert incursion of Russian forces into the peninsula. (Of
course, the subsequent annexation of Crimea was also validated by a formal referendum
of the good, old-fashioned, blatantly rigged variety.) All this notwithstanding, historical
precedent suggests that, once unleashed, irregular forms of quasi-plebiscitary self-determi-
nation are liable to take on lives of their own. The al-Sisis and Putins of the world would do
well to consider the law of unintended consequences.
