The article is devoted to the study of the category of future in French, Russian, Tatar and Mari aphorisms. The data were taken from international and regional mass media. We compared proverbs, sayings, appeals, mottoes, slogans, cliches, symbol phrases, and quotations. The special attention was paid to functioning of aphorisms expressing the concepts “power” and “politician”. The conducted analysis showed that the most frequent aphorisms in mass media of the languages under the study relate to the following lexico-semantic fields: foreign/domestic policy, state/country, state structures / services, establish-ments, governing bodies, political system, authorities, heads of political structures, parties, movements, and their members. The analyzed languages aphorisms are based on precedent texts and intertextuality. The use of internal resources of language prevails in the Russian, French and Tatar political discourses while the regional languages tend to calque aphorisms from Russian and have a relatively small number of occa-sional aphorisms. Besides the grammar means of expression of future, which is typical of all the languages analyzed, Russian, Tatar, and French contain lexical and grammatical means. The Russian language demonstrates semantic transformation in political aphorisms expressing the future. The article revealed the predominance of aphorisms in political discourse relating to the core area of functional semantic field of futurity, over the periphery and border zone. The results of the study show that aphorisms with the meaning of future are more typical of the Russian political discourse in comparison with the French, Tatar and Mari political discourses.