A VICTORY by a pro-Kremlin candidate in mayoral elections at the weekend is to be challenged in court.
Boris Nemtsov, a nationally known opposition candidate, said the result, in Russia’s southern resort town of Sochi, was “absolutely falsified”. He vowed to take a case all the way to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, in his quest to get the result overturned.
Anatoly Pakhomov, the pro-Kremlin incumbent mayor of Sochi, site of the 2014 Winter Olympics, won 76 per cent of the vote compared with a little more than 13 per cent for Mr Nemtsov.
The poll was seen as a barometer of the strength of Russia’s democratic opposition and a measure of the political sensitivity of Sochi, which faces a €4.6 billion building programme to be ready for the games.
The legal challenge is unlikely to succeed but could prove a public-relations headache for Russia’s leadership, which is doing everything possible to defend the reputation of the Olympics from opposition efforts to create a scandal, observers said. A case would draw attention to Mr Nemtsov’s claim that many Sochi residents face unfair expropriation of land to build Olympic infrastructure.
The Sochi poll, in spite of a pledge by Russian president Dmitry Medvedev this month that Russia “had, has and will have democracy”, clearly failed the test for many observers. Yury Dzaganiya, the communist candidate who came in third with 6 per cent, said he had faced a total media blackout. International observers said 30 per cent of the votes were submitted before the election, a legal procedure but one that it is open to manipulation.
However, Mr Pakhomov’s margin of victory will make it hard to convince any court that the degree of falsification was enough to be decisive.
Mr Nemtsov's supporters also said they were frustrated at the tactics he used during the race. He ran an uneven campaign, they said, shunning committed local activists in favour of a slick public-relations machine flown in from Moscow. – (Copyright The Financial TimesLimited 2009)