he ridiculed the “song and dance” that voters are given

[GoodTaste]

“Democracy is not an ornament to be used for decoration; it is to be used to solve the problems that the people want to solve,” Mr. Xi said at a gathering of top Communist Party leaders in October, according to Xinhua, the state news agency. (In the same address, he ridiculed the “song and dance” that voters are given during elections, contending that voters have little influence until the next campaign.)

Source: New York Times

Does "song and dance" here figratively refer to performance (overfamiliar, backneyed routine)?

 

[teechar]

Does "song and dance" here figuratively refer to the performance (overfamiliar, or the hackneyed routine of election candidates)?

Yes, it does. Note the corrections and that "overfamiliar" is not the right word for that sentence.

 

[Tdol]

A song and dance is an unnecessary fuss.

 

[jutfrank]

The phrase 'song and dance' is someone's translation of the original Chinese that Mr Xi used.

I don't want to read too much into this, but I think he's expressing the idea that Western-style democracy is not very participatory. Voters sit quietly between elections, which he sees largely as a 'spectacle' ('ornament', 'song and dance') designed to produce in the population a false sense of democratic participation. All this is in contrast to his idea of China's 'whole-process' people's democracy.

Here's more context:

Whether a country is a democracy or not depends on whether its people are really the masters of the country, Xi said at the October conference.

If the people are awakened only for voting but enter a dormant period soon after, if they are given a song and dance during campaigning but have no say after the election, or if they are favored during canvassing but are left out in the cold after the election, such a democracy is not a true democracy, he added.