THE MAIN international election observation organisation, of which Russia itself is a member, has been strongly critical of the conduct of the election in which prime minister Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party lost 77 seats in the 450-member state Duma.
Usually extremely circumspect in their assessment of elections, the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe pulled few punches in its preliminary findings issued at a press conference in Moscow yesterday.
The election was characterised, the organisation said, by frequent procedural violations and instances of apparent manipulations including serious indications of ballot-box stuffing. While it did not mention which party had benefited from the irregularities, it was obvious that United Russia was the one that gained most.
In one of the polling stations I visited on Sunday, station 174 on Timur Frunze Street in central Moscow, about 200 votes for United Russia were discovered in one of the ballot boxes before the station had even opened for voting. All the vote had been marked for United Russia.
Patients in some hospitals were presented with ballot papers already marked for the governing party, which received 93 per cent of the votes in one of Moscow’s psychiatric hospitals. Some local political leaders also had their say.
In Chechnya, for example, where Ramzan Kadyrov rules at Mr Putin’s behest, the turnout was 99.51 per cent, of which United Russia received 99.47 per cent of the votes.
These figures are believed by no one in Russia or elsewhere, and may have been achieved due to the absence of OSCE observers, who left Chechnya out of their plans for security reasons.
On the other hand, figures for the Moscow region and the city of St Petersburg showed the percentage for United Russia to be in the 30s, the St Petersburg result sending a stinging message to Mr Putin from his home town. With almost all the votes counted, United Russia won 238 seats compared to 315 in the previous Duma. The Communist Party finished in second place with 92, the Social Democratic grouping A Just Russia had 64, with the far-right Liberal Democrats of Vladimir Zhirinovsky on 56.
Significantly, the poll setback not only deprives United Russia of the two-thirds majority needed to change certain articles of the constitution but even if it got its usual support from Mr Zhirinovsky’s group it would still fall six votes short of two-thirds of the lower house.
Despite the obviously flawed nature of the count, the OSCE correctly remarked that the elections proved “the Russian people can form the future of this country by expressing their will despite many obstacles”. It is a message that is already being digested by senior officials in United Russia who are aware the growing middle class has largely rejected them.