By Fred Weir, Correspondent / October 19, 2009
Former leader Mikhail Gorbachev and others are
outraged after last week's elections, which only 3 percent
of Russians believed were fair, according to a poll.
MOSCOW – What can one single vote, confirmed missing, tell
us about the current state of democracy in Russia?
A lot, says Sergei Mitrokhin, leader of the liberal Yabloko
party. He says that the lost vote in question – his own
– offers startling evidence to back widespread opposition
claims that regional polls held across Russia last week
were stage-managed to ensure the victory of pro-Kremlin
forces.
The United Russia (UR) party, which is led by Prime Minister
Vladimir Putin, won about 80 percent of all contested positions
in some 7,000 districts around the country. In the crucial
center of Moscow, UR swept up 32 of the 35 city council
seats.
Along with millions of other Russians, Mr. Mitrokhin went
with his family to vote at their local polling station,
No. 192, in Moscow's tony Khamovniki district on election
day. He knows for sure that he voted for his own party ticket.
But when the final official tally was released last weekend,
it showed that zero votes for Yabloko were registered at
polling station No. 192.
"We know there were massive falsifications in the
vote counting, but really, not a single vote for Yabloko?"
says Mitrokhin. "It's almost as if they wanted to prove
I don't exist as a living being. It looks like the authorities
are not even trying to pretend any longer that we are having
real elections."
Gorbachev: democratic system is 'maimed'
A public opinion survey published this week by the daily
Noviye Izvestia newspaper found that just 3 percent of respondents
believe the elections were a fair and true democratic exercise.
A third thought that UR's victory was due to "massive
falsifications" while a further 44 percent said the
party benefited unduly from its command of "administrative
resources," meaning official influence, state media
backing, and access to government funds.
Yabloko has documented multiple cases of what is says is
official fraud, coercion, and other legal violations in
the election campaign and subsequent voting, some of which
has been translated and posted on the party's English-language
website (http://www.eng.yabloko.ru/).
But Mitrokhin's outrage over what looks like the most seriously
miscarried electoral exercise in Russia's post-Soviet history
has been increasingly echoed by independent commentators,
including the father of Russia's troubled democracy, former
Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev.
"In the eyes of everyone, elections have turned into
a mockery of the people and people have great distrust over
how their votes are used," Mr. Gorbachev told the opposition
weekly Novaya Gazeta, of which he is part owner, on Monday.
"What is democracy when the people don't participate
in it?" he said. "The electoral system has been
utterly maimed. We need an alternative."
'Everyone knows the electoral process is dirty'
Last week, scores of opposition parliamentarians staged
a walkout from the State Duma to dramatize their complaints
about the elections, but by Monday all but a few deputies
of the Communist Party had returned.
The chairman of Russia's official Electoral Commission,
Vladimir Churov, warned the protesting lawmakers that they
might be breaking the law, and added if they had doubts
about the process they could challenge them by "signing
an official protocol" of complaint. If that doesn't
work, he added, they can "file a lawsuit."
Lawsuits against electoral authorities in the past have
almost always been dismissed by state-dominated courts.
"Everyone knows that the electoral process is dirty,
and that UR basically controls the system," says Alexei
Mukhin, director of the independent Center for Political
Technologies in Moscow. "In fact, the whole world sees
this, and it's causing serious damage to the image of the
country's top leaders. The Kremlin needs to take action
to change this situation," before the next cycle of
elections in just over two years time, he says.
Since Mr. Putin came to power in 2000, Russia's political
system has been forcibly reshaped to eliminate pesky opposition
parties and game elections to favor the giant and reliably
pro-Kremlin UR. Mr. Putin's party now controls the vast
majority of regional legislatures, most big city councils,
and a more than two-thirds majority in the State Duma, the
lower house of parliament.
That system, dubbed "managed democracy," reached
a climax last year when Putin ushered his hand-picked successor
Dmitri Medvedev into the Kremlin against virtually no opposition.
Kremlin facade of democracy
The Kremlin's efforts to create a facade that looks like
genuinely contested elections – while ruthlessly eliminating
serious contenders – took on almost comical dimensions in
polls to choose a new mayor for Sochi, the host of the 2014
Olympic Games, where Putin has invested about $12 billion
of the state's cash and much of his own personal credibility.
In the event last March, Putin's candidate won with a 77
percent majority, while opposition candidates and democracy
activists launched futile protests over what they called
heavy-handed state manipulation at every stage of the process.
But experts say the wave of regional elections carried
out last week make those polls look almost fair by comparison.
"As we have seen in the past, candidates who were
unwanted by the authorities were simply disqualified early
in the process," says Andrei Buzin, chairman of the
Interregional Association of Voters, a grassroots monitoring
group. "As before, the police were often deployed to
block opposition activities and meetings. But, unlike the
past, when we didn't see direct falsifications, there was
a lot of falsification in the vote counting in these elections."
Mr. Buzin says "the situation is getting worse, subjectively
and objectively, much worse."
Former Russian deputy prime minister Boris Nemtsov, who
faced huge obstacles in his bid to run for mayor of Sochi
last April, says that this time around no candidate from
his Solidarnost movement was allowed to run for city office
in Moscow.
"Every single one of our candidates was disqualified,
supposedly due to fraudulent signatures on their nomination
forms," says Mr. Nemtsov. Even Nemtsov's own signature
on one of the forms was declared invalid by officials, he
says.
"It's absolutely terrible, like an election in the
German Democratic Republic [the former East Germany],"
he says. "Forget about elections in this country. It's
just fraud, manipulation, and corruption. It's a great big
fiction."
Reproduced with a kind permission of The Chrisitan
Science Monitor
See also:
the
original
Elections
to the Moscow City Duma, 2009
