Politics & Power Quote by Adnan Pachachi

There is a quiet menace in Pachachi's phrasing: he speaks like a man inside the system who has stopped pretending the system deserves automatic loyalty. "Rapidly losing confidence" is the key tell. This isn't the slow, background cynicism that democracies learn to live with; it's the speed that signals legitimacy draining in real time. By framing it as a mass mood shift rather than an ideological dispute, he points to a more dangerous problem than partisan disagreement: a collapse of the basic trust that makes governing possible.

The second clause, "and I don't blame them", does two jobs at once. It sounds empathetic, but it also functions as an indictment. A politician publicly absolving citizens of their distrust implies the political class has earned it through incompetence, corruption, or unkept promises. He doesn't name culprits, which is strategic: vagueness makes the criticism harder to dismiss as factional sniping. It's a rebuke that can survive in a fractious environment because it targets a category ("the political class") rather than a rival.

Context matters with Pachachi, a veteran Iraqi statesman shaped by coups, foreign interventions, and the brutal costs of state failure. Coming from that biography, the line reads less like a populist jab and more like a warning flare: when people stop believing politics can deliver order and dignity, they look elsewhere - sect, strongman, street, or exit. The power of the quote is its restrained realism. It doesn't romanticize the public; it simply grants them the right to withdraw consent, and forces elites to confront what they've squandered.