RUSSIAN ELECTION watchdog Golos (Voice) will deploy 3,000 observers at tomorrow’s parliamentary elections despite attempts to have its work banned.
Golos has been subjected to fierce criticism by Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin, and a programme on the national NTV television channel last night accused it of abusing its mandate.
In a speech at a party rally, Mr Putin hinted that foreign powers were using non-governmental organisations to try to influence the result of the elections.
Golos receives funding from outside Russia from pro-democracy organisations in the US such as the National Endowment for Democracy and the National Democratic Institute.
Once the voice of the democratic opposition, NTV is now, like all others, a strong proponent of the ruling United Russia party. The channel’s attack on Golos was not the only example of partiality in its programming yesterday.
A hint of objectivity on its late afternoon news bulletin yesterday quickly grabbed viewers’ attention. Russian president Dmitry Medvedev, looking serious, spoke to the nation about the election and exhorted citizens to turn out and vote for whichever party they felt would fulfil their wishes for their own future and for the future of Russia.
The news programme immediately cut to last week’s congress of United Russia, and there was Mr Medvedev again using almost the same words.
He urged citizens to secure their own future and the future of Russia not by voting for the party of their choice, but by turning out to vote in large numbers for United Russia.
One political observer in Moscow who did not wish to be named said there were reasons why Mr Medvedev had been looking serious recently. She believed United Russia was deliberately not trying hard in this election.
The theory is there are people in the party who want to see Mr Medvedev fail as party leader so that Mr Putin can take over in the run-up to the key presidential election next March.
There are indications that United Russia will lose seats. A national poll by the reliable Levada Centre has forecast that its representation will fall from 315 seats to 252 or 253, enough to retain a simple majority but not the two-thirds needed to make certain constitutional changes.
Local polls have suggested an even worse performance. In the Moscow region, which is composed of the towns and rural areas surrounding the capital, a poll by the Institute for Social Studies puts United Russia in first place, but only just.
The institute interviewed a sample of 2,109 people of voting age in 24 locations in the region from November 25th to December 1st. It found that 23.2 per cent would vote for United Russia, and 19 per cent for the communists, the same figure for social democratic grouping A Just Russia, 13.4 per cent for the ultra-right-wing Liberal Democrats and only 2.9 per cent for the pro-western Yabloko Party.
More concerning were the responses to questions on how the elections would be held.
Only 7.6 per cent felt the elections would be run honestly, with 30.5 per cent saying they would be run dishonestly, and the rest saying they did not know or found the question difficult to answer.
Here in Kazan, United Russia is likely to do well because of the immense positive changes to the city’s economy and the traditional respect of the local Tatar Muslim population for their political leaders, most of whom favour the government party.
Among younger Tatars, however, the attitude is different.
Danis Garayev, a sociologist and student of Islam, said he had more than 600 friends on kontakti.ru, the Russian equivalent of Facebook.
Only one of them said he considered voting for United Russia and he immediately came under attack from all the others.
The 450 Duma deputies will be elected on a list system of proportional representation with all of Russia as a single constituency and a threshold of 7 per cent of the national vote.