The Russian Election: Post-Apocalypse Perspectives
Filed under: Russia
The Moscow Times reports that war-torn Chechnya recorded 99.5% voter turnout in last weekend's parliamentary ballot, and of that over 99.3% went to Vladimir Putin's party United Russia. When asked whether this freakish and absurd result didn't clearly indicate voter fraud, the Kremlin denied any such possibility and claimed that the region's "special traditions" explained it.
And they're quite right. Those "traditions" date back to Josef Stalin.
The MT also reports that Andrei Lugovoi, who stands accused by the British government of murdering anti-Putin dissident Alexander Litvinenko with Russian-made polonium-based radiation poisoning, was elected into the Russian legislature on the "Liberal Democratic" ticket of insane nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky. Already immune from British prosecution since the Russian government refused to extradite him on "constitutional" grounds, from his perch in the Duma Lugovoi is now immune from any Russian prosecution as well. This is convenient, since the Kremlin's original reason for refusing extradition was patently bogus.
For sheer unmitigated contempt towards the democratic process, this has to rival the election by the the Russian people of several former Politburo members into their first legislature a few years back. Dare we wonder how Russians would react if Britons elected Boris Berezovsky into their legislature?
Garry Kasparov's party Other Russia, denied a place on the ballot entirely, has collected a litany of evidence of vote fraud and published it on its English-language website. Der Spiegel reports that the German government has condemned the elections, saying through spokesman Thomas Steg: "There can be no doubt. Measured by our standards, it was neither a free, fair nor democratic election." The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe joined them in this view.
Despite the fact that, with all this blatant fraud, Putin's two slavishly loyal parties (United Russia and Fair Russia) garnered 72% of the vote (and an even larger share of the actual seats), Russian papers reported that Putin was still not satisfied with the result, wanting United Russia alone to match his personal 70% mandate from the 2004 presidential election. It may well have been Putin's "plan" to have only his two parties breach the 7% minimum support required for seats, with Fair Russia serving as the "opposition."
So the consolation for those who love democracy is apparently that "at least the Duma still has some Communists and insane radical nationalists in it." And so it goes in Russia.