first things first, make it past the first election.
in your first term in office as the glorious leader try to start lowering press freedom, and try to gain lots of support of the patriots group, as well as increasing the population of patriots, do this by introducing loads of patriot policies it doesn't really matter which ones.
HOWEVER at the same time make sure your public opinion stays at least at a good enough level to make it past the first election, so give people what they want too. you probably wont be able to decrease press freedom fully on your first term.

hey we are getting somewhere supreme leader!

once you have made it past your first term things should get easier. in the second term continue to decrease press freedom and increase popularity of patriots and their opinion of you. you can do this in any order but just make sure your public opinion is still high enough to make it past elections. also make sure press freedom is at 0% before the third term in office.

once you've done this and made it to the 3rd term you hopefully (if you've done it right) will notice that people for some reason, are really starting to like you, as 0% press freedom tends to do that given some time. from now on you can choose to increase your term length but mainly to get the population of patriots at 100% which i assure you is possible, I've done this twice. by this point you will never have to worry about being re-elected ever again (so long as you keep the patriots happy) and now you have successfully turned your country into a dictatorship, which is the best kind of country ;)

One last thing, make sure you keep on top of terrorist groups as they cant get a bit angry, but once you've introduced sub-machine guns, microchip implants, state of the art prisons etc.. there will be nothing able to stand in the way of your glorious rule!

Long Live the Supreme Leader!











PS: this guide is quite clearly a bit of a JOKE, but what I've told you to do does work in game, its been tried and tested by myself, however it does involve independent thinking when doing this yourself, and you may have to do things differently, a heads up also both times i did this i was playing as UK. also I AM NOT AN EXPERT and i am in no way insanely good at the game. Also updates could have changed how difficult it is to do this, or weather its possible to do it this way anymore, so if your viewing this from the future, last time i tested this was November 2020.