"They're making a song and dance because that serves their immediate interests. But what will happen tomorrow? They will have to pay salaries and pensions"
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Shevardnadze’s line lands like a cold hand on the forehead: a warning delivered in the drab, unglamorous language of budgets. “Song and dance” is doing double duty here. It mocks the theatrics of rivals who whip up public emotion, and it implies something darker: politics as performance, where the applause matters more than the governing. The phrase is deliberately dismissive, reducing supposedly historic gestures to stagecraft designed to win the next news cycle.
The pivot - “But what will happen tomorrow?” - is the real blade. It’s not just a plea for prudence; it’s an attempt to claim the moral high ground of adulthood. Shevardnadze frames himself as the man staring past the parade, counting the receipts. Salaries and pensions are the least glamorous obligations of the state, and that’s precisely why he names them. In post-Soviet politics, those payments weren’t abstract line items; they were the difference between stability and street anger, between legitimacy and collapse. Promise is easy. Payroll is governance.
The subtext is also defensive: he’s implicitly arguing that his opponents can afford spectacle because they won’t be around when the bills come due - or they’re betting they can blame someone else when reality arrives. It’s a compact critique of populism before the term became fashionable, and a reminder that in fragile systems, fiscal continuity isn’t technocratic trivia. It’s the thin thread holding the social contract together.
The pivot - “But what will happen tomorrow?” - is the real blade. It’s not just a plea for prudence; it’s an attempt to claim the moral high ground of adulthood. Shevardnadze frames himself as the man staring past the parade, counting the receipts. Salaries and pensions are the least glamorous obligations of the state, and that’s precisely why he names them. In post-Soviet politics, those payments weren’t abstract line items; they were the difference between stability and street anger, between legitimacy and collapse. Promise is easy. Payroll is governance.
The subtext is also defensive: he’s implicitly arguing that his opponents can afford spectacle because they won’t be around when the bills come due - or they’re betting they can blame someone else when reality arrives. It’s a compact critique of populism before the term became fashionable, and a reminder that in fragile systems, fiscal continuity isn’t technocratic trivia. It’s the thin thread holding the social contract together.
Quote Details
| Topic | Money |
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