This is just a straw man fallacy I keep seeing pushed around, especially on pro-Russia subs in reddit. Elections are about how you choose who takes the role, it

This is just a straw man fallacy I keep seeing pushed around, especially on pro-Russia subs in reddit. Elections are about how you choose who takes the role, it's not about what the role is - which can be a fascist dictator with popular support. It is a popular genre in the last 10-15 years, the fascists and dictators with popular support use their control of media, police, judiciary etc to align all the odds in their favor and go ahead and hold real elections and as long as the margin is large enough they don't cheat on the elections. Even when they loose an election they tend to have loyalists embedded deep in the institutions and take power back through sabotage and legal battles. For example, they set the governing process in such a way that it's practically impossible to effectively govern by following the rules, when they loose an election the new people are having very hard time, services start to suffer. They need to do reforms and change the laws and if they don't have supermajority they are being blocked and end up either screw up governing or follow the practical paths of governing like the previous government used to do. This results in either losing elections next time as the public sees this as incompetence or being sent into jail as judiciary selectively targets you for corruption when you take shortcuts to get things done. So it is a fascist dictatorship even if there are elections and official power transfer because the institution than wield power follow orders to smash opponents of their leader during their reign or even after they are officially not in power.