Too well controlled (i.e. scared) to be otherwise.
There was a story told, but there is no way of verifying this. In one of the cities when the electricity failed completely the factory workers were told to go home and wait and many of them did exactly that, starving to death behind the locked doors of their workers' appartments.
The principal issue remains, what is to be done about the situation in the north. Talk to them as they offered or maybe you have a better alternative.
The better alternative is regime change.
Death to tyrants.