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Kremlin tightens grip after regional elections
By Nick Coleman
AFP
MOSCOW
Petroleumworld.com 03 13 07Parties loyal to President Vladimir Putin steamrolled regional elections, provisional results showed Monday, confirming the Kremlin's grip on power ahead of parliamentary and presidential polls.
The pro-Kremlin United Russia party secured commanding leads in 13 out of 14 races. The 14th region, Stavropol, went to another pro-Kremlin party, A Just Russia, according to preliminary results.
The polls, in which 31 million people or about a third of the electorate, were eligible to vote, were seen as setting the stage for nationwide parliamentary elections in December.
The December polls will in turn form the backdrop to the presidential vote to confirm a successor to Putin next March.But critics dismissed the polls as being wholly undemocratic.
"The election process overall has become meaningless in its present form," the Gazeta daily concluded.
"The amount of falsification, black PR, open criminality, pressure and threats to opponents was simply too great," Gazeta said.
Average voter turnout was 39.14 percent, election commission head Alexander Veshnyakov said.
Preliminary results showed that one liberal opposition party, the Union of Right Forces, managed to cross the seven-percent threshold needed to qualify for seats in five of the regions, the election commission said.
The bar was recently raised, excluding all but the most powerful parties from winning seats in the proportional representation system.
The veteran liberal party Yabloko looked set to fail in all 14 regions. It had already been excluded from races in a potential stronghold Saint Petersburg on a technicality, which it disputed unsuccessfully.
But the main intrigue was the acrimonious battle between the two pro-Kremlin parties, as well as numerous allegations of violations.
Sergei Mironov, head of A Just Russia and also speaker of the upper house of parliament, alleged dirty tricks were used to steal votes from his party.In regions where "we have a very good position and expected a reasonable result, there were the most violations by our opponents," said Mironov.
Newspapers reported an election-related shooting in which one person was injured in the unstable southern province of Dagestan, while in Saint Petersburg, an election candidate was seriously injured in a stabbing.
The vote looked likely to confirm criticism by Western governments and opposition groups that the Kremlin has reined in the democratisation that took place after the Soviet Union's 1991 collapse, particularly by quashing independent media.
Boris Kagarlitsky of the Moscow-based Institute for Globalisation and Social Movements, said Sunday's vote confirmed that future races would be a struggle among elites, with little input from the population at large.
He pointed to the men widely seen as likely contenders to succeed Putin, the two deputy prime ministers Sergei Ivanov and Dmitry Medvedev.
While the two might try to join forces with one or another party, even attract opposition support "they're not selected by any real democratic process," Kagarlitsky said.Sunday's vote, Kagarlitsky said, "is a perfect oligarchic contest. The contest is real and more or less fair but it's an oligarchic contest. It has nothing to do with people's interests, with democracy, as everyone is excluded."
Analysts also noted the relatively low turnout at the election. But that will not influence the results, as the minimum turnout threshold has been abolished. Also abolished was the "vote-against-all" option.
Andrei Piontkovsky, director of the Institute of Political Studies, stressed that the "turn-out is very low, even in the politicised Moscow region."
While Russia is enjoying growing oil wealth, "the voters have been made passive," he said.
"The election has shown that the people are not a problem. The only problem is the transition period. The struggles for the seat of power," Piontkovsky said.
Last Friday, the Kommersant newspaper published an interview with former presidential candidate Sergei Glazyev saying he was leaving politics due to the unprecedented concentration of political power in the Kremlin.
"Politics in the country today is decided by one person. Even under the tsars the concentration of power was less as they had to take notice of the church. Today even that doesn't happen," Glazyev said.
AFP 12 1235 GMT 03 07
Copyright© 2007 AFP. All Rights Reserved.
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