Putin’s Election Victory Tainted By Allegations of Fraud
MOSCOW _ In the Ural Mountains, Russians reported receiving vodka or movie tickets in exchange for voting for Vladimir Putin’s party. In Moscow, some said they were slipped $29 at the polls. In northwest Russia, voters said polling station officials gave them ballots already marked for Putin’s party.
Such reports were piling up at Golos, a Russian watchdog group monitoring Sunday’s parliamentary election that handed Putin’s United Russia a landslide victory and gave the party an overwhelming majority in the Russian legislature.
The legitimacy of Putin’s crushing electoral triumph was under fire Monday as evidence mounted that Russian authorities used their administrative powers to ensure a convincing victory for United Russia, which Putin desired to ensure his “moral right” to continue wielding strong influence over the country beyond his presidency.
A European observer team delivered a scathing evaluation of the Russian government’s handling of the election, saying authorities abused their powers by effectively turning the state into a campaign tool for United Russia.
“I have a lot of concerns about the evolution of democracy in this country,” said Luc van den Brande, co-chief of a joint observer delegation from Europe. “Political stability and economic growth should go hand in hand not with lessened democracy, but with strengthened democracy.”
The reaction from the German government, regarded as one of the Kremlin’s strongest allies in Western Europe, was even stronger.
“Measured by our standards, this wasn’t a free, fair or democratic election,” said Thomas Steg, a spokesman for the German government. “Russia wasn’t a democracy, and isn’t a democracy.”
United Russia’s margin of victory was large enough to give the party the two-thirds majority needed in Russia’s lower chamber of parliament to change the country’s constitution. United Russia garnered 64 percent of the vote, giving it 315 seats in the 450-seat chamber.
Trailing far behind with just 11.5 percent was the Communist Party, which now becomes United Russia’s only opposition in the legislature. Two other pro-Kremlin parties garnered enough votes to win a small share of seats.
With Putin nearing the end of his eight-year presidency next spring, the charismatic Russian leader sought to transform the legislative election into a plebiscite on himself and his achievements in rescuing Russia from the economic chaos of the 1990s under predecessor Boris Yeltsin.
Putin told Russians that a convincing victory would give him the “moral right” to ensure the government adheres to his course even after constitutional term limits force him to step down in May. With such a signal, he would continue to wield influence over the country, though he has been cryptic about what role he will take to achieve that.
United Russia’s overwhelming win appeared to give Putin the mandate he was looking for. In remarks broadcast on Russian television Monday, he thanked voters and called the results “a sign of public trust.”
“It shows that our citizens understand how many things depend on which choice they make, which plan and which party they prefer,” he said.
However, while Putin’s popularity with Russians is undeniable, the state’s use of its power to maximize United Russia’s advantage over opposition parties fatally marred the election’s credibility, European observers said.
Access to broadcast media, which is almost entirely state-controlled, was heavily biased toward United Russia, said observers, members of a joint team from the parliamentary assemblies of the Council of Europe and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
The observer team also criticized Russian authorities for harassing and detaining opposition candidates and confiscating opposition campaign materials. During the campaign, the Communist Party, the Union of Right Forces party and other opposition groups complained that Russian authorities had confiscated millions of their leaflets and fliers, effectively crippling their ability to campaign because their organizations were given minimal access to media outlets.
The joint European observer team also singled out Putin, criticizing him for using the office of president as a campaign instrument for United Russia. Just four days before the election, Putin delivered an address on a nationally televised newscast in which he urged voters to support United Russia and warned that voting for the liberal opposition would return the country “to a time of humiliation, dependency and disintegration.”
Goran Lennmarker, who helped lead the European observation team, said he has been observing the evolution of democracy in Russia since the Soviet collapse, “and I hoped this (election) would be a step forward in that development. Unfortunately, I don’t think it is. And that makes me sad.”
Officials with Golos, a Russian election monitoring group, said reports of election violations continued to stream in Monday. The group received several reports of voters in Moscow appearing at polling stations and being bribed 700 rubles, or about $29, to vote for United Russia. Voters in other regions reported receiving gifts from United Russia activists in exchange for their vote.
“There were also reports of people voting several times at different polling stations,” said Lilia Shibanova, director of Golos, which dispatched 2,000 members to polling stations to monitor the elections.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov defended the Russian government’s handling of the election and bristled at suggestions it marked a step backward for democracy in Russia.
Peskov denied that opposition parties were not given access to media outlets, and he said Russian law allows the president to actively campaign while in office, a practice commonplace in other countries.
“We treat this kind of sharp criticism as criticism based on information that is one-sided, that has no proof,” Peskov said. “Certainly we would disagree with the estimation that Russia is undemocratic and the election was undemocratic. Russia is a developing democracy that had free and fair elections.”
Former chess champion Garry Kasparov, a fierce Putin critic who recently served five days in jail for leading a march against the president in downtown Moscow, had a different view of Sunday’s vote.
“There are no illusions that what is being called an election was the most unfair and dirtiest in the whole history of modern Russia,” Kasparov said at a news conference in Moscow.
On Monday night, police prevented Kasparov from leading a group of pro-democracy activists to the Russian Central Elections Commission building to lay flowers there, a symbolic gesture meant to signify the death of democracy. A handful of Kasparov’s supporters carrying red carnations appeared near the building but were thwarted by a cordon of riot police and a large group of pro-Kremlin youths.
“Basic democratic principles have been buried by this administration,” said Svetlana Varnavskaya, a 50-year-old Moscow teacher and a Kasparov loyalist. “This regime has taken off its mask and revealed its true face. There’s nothing more to hope for, though I wish people would wake up at last.”
The barrage of criticism surrounding Sunday’s vote comes as Russian authorities embark on preparations for the March 2 presidential election. Putin and United Russia are expected to name their candidate for successor later this month.
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