Behind Putin’s easy victory
IN RUSSIA’S parliamentary election on Sunday, Vladimir Putin’s party won threequarters of the seats outright in the State Duma, the lower house of the Russian parliament, and the rest indirectly, through parties loyal to him. It apparently did so without many voting irregularities, and despite a sluggish economy, sanctions imposed by the West and unrest in some quarters over the government’s crackdown on civil liberties. What gives?
What gives is the sorry degree to which Putin and his Kremlin cronies have consolidated full control over Russian politics. Twenty-five years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia appears to have returned full circle to a pseudo-parliament whose only function is to give a semblance of legitimacy to an authoritarian ruler. The post-Soviet Russian constitution already granted more powers to the president and Cabinet than to the legislature, but at least the Duma was a platform for the opposition to question and criticise Kremlin policies. Now even this function is effectively gone.
It’s true that after almost 17 years in power as president or prime minister, Putin enjoys an astounding approval rating hovering around 80 percent – founded in part on his demagogic claims to be standing up to the West, which he accuses of engineering all Russia’s woes.
Yet the larger truth is that Putin’s political opponents have been systematically imprisoned, driven into exile, harassed, intimidated and sometimes killed. Sadly, the few opposition candidates who did run seemed incapable of uniting into a cohesive block, but they also got no television time, their donors were scared off and their campaigns were dogged by hecklers and provocateurs.
A scant two weeks before the vote, Russia’s leading independent polling organisation, Levada Center, which reported a drop in the ruling party’s popularity, was labelled a “foreign agent” – a tag Putin has used with devastating effect since 2012 to undermine nongovernmental civil society groups. Of the legislators who dared challenge Putin’s policies in the last parliament, one – Ilya Ponomarev, who cast the lone vote against the annexation of Crimea – is now in self-imposed exile, and another, Dmitry Gudkov, was voted out.
If there was a way the voters expressed discontent, it was by not voting. The 47.8 percent turnout was a record low for postSoviet Russia, far below the 60 percent in 2011, and it was especially low in major urban areas. In Moscow, less than 30 percent of eligible voters cast ballots, compared with more than 50 percent in 2011.
Putin is free to run for yet another sixyear term as president in 2018 should he choose to. Until then, his grip on power is secure. All the parliamentary election really showed was that those Russians who had once tried to shape a real democracy had been crushed or swept aside, or had given up for now.