RUSSIAN OPPOSITION figures complained yesterday that the authorities had stolen the local elections as 30 million people voted across the country.
United Russia, the party headed by former president and now prime minister Vladimir Putin, looks set to roll to victory in 76 of Russia’s 83 regions.
Despite recent and much publicised democratic overtures by president Dmitry Medvedev, liberal parties said little had changed since he took over as president last year.
Opposition party Yabloko spoke yesterday of “massive voting by people outside of their areas of residence, and without any supporting identification”.
The central election committee, which oversees the elections, insisted that the number of complaints about yesterday’s elections was lower than on March 1st, the date of the last big wave of local elections. Regime opponents say most of the damage was done before election day. In Moscow, a number of liberal opposition figures were not allowed to run, after signatures they gathered to put on the ballot were disqualified as illegitimate.
Vladimir Milov, a member of the opposition Solidarity party, who was disqualified in this manner as a candidate for the Moscow legislature, urged supporters on his blog to deface their ballots, rather than leaving them blank in protest, “because otherwise the ballots will simply be sold”. He added that “if the number of ineligible ballots is high, this will be impossible to hide”.
The Kremlin’s appetite for power seems to be taking a new turn in Moscow itself, where despite ensuring the success of United Russia in every election since the party’s creation in 2001, city mayor Yuri Luzhkov, a party founder, faces increasing political pressure to stand aside.
Speculation on the subject began in June after the Cherkizovsky Market, one of the largest commercial operations in Moscow, was closed seemingly at the behest of Mr Putin. This was widely interpreted as a blow against Mr Luzhkov. Local press attention has recently focused on Mr Luzhkov’s wife, Yelena Baturina, who Forbes magazine regularly rates as the richest woman in Russia.
“Technically speaking, the Kremlin can replace Luzhkov at any moment and of course there is no shortage of people who would love his job,” said Masha Lipman, a political expert at the Carnegie Moscow Center, a think-tank.
“There were significant violations on the day and in the pre-election campaign,” Liliya Shibanova, head of independent poll watchdog Golos, told Reuters by telephone.
“There was huge non-registration of candidates, posters were taken down and almost any kind of campaigning was blocked.”
Six parties registered for yesterday’s Moscow vote, but the only posters in the city were for Kremlin-backed United Russia. – (Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009, Reuters)