Putin reign to rival Stalin
RUSSIA: Vladimir Putin yesterday won a fourth presidential term with more than 70 per cent of the vote, according to exit polls, a strong result after a campaign troubled by lack of interest and an opposition boycott.
The public opinion foundation said 77 per cent of votes cast were for Putin, while WCIOM, the state pollster, said he got nearly 74 per cent.
While his victory was never in doubt, a poorer showing than the
64 per cent he got in the 2012 presidential election could have called the continuation of his 18-year rule into question.
Another six-year term will allow Putin, 65, to rival Joseph Stalin as the country’s longestserving leader.
Alexei Navalny, the opposition leader, who was barred from running due to a politicised embezzlement conviction, called a voter boycott and recruited 26,000 electoral observers to catch any attempts to inflate turnout. The WCIOM exit poll placed turnout at
63.7 per cent, just below the 65 per cent the Kremlin was reportedly seeking.
At a school polling station in Odintsovo, an industrial city of
140,000 people in the Moscow region, Sergei Nekhayonok, an electoral commission member, described pressure from the authorities to ‘‘raise turnout’’.
The state-owned factory where he works had been sending him and other employees door-to-door for the past two weeks to encourage people to vote, he said.
Andrei Kondrashov, Putin’s campaign spokesman, offered a tongue-in-cheek thank you to Britain for the diplomatic row over the poisoning of Sergei Skripal, the double agent, which he said had created a ‘‘turnout we couldn’t have dreamed of ourselves’’.
‘‘When Russia indiscriminately and without evidence is accused of something, all that the Russian people do is come together around a centre of power. The centre of power today is Putin,’’ he said.
While Pavel Grudinin, the communist candidate, was placed a distant second, his reported 11.2 per cent marked an improvement over his poll numbers. Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the perennial nationalist candidate, got 6.7 per cent.
Reports of falsifications threatened to tarnish Putin’s victory, however. Navalny said the officially reported turnout exceeded what his network of electoral observers had counted.
Online polling station cameras captured many blatant violations. In Chechnya, where Putin won 99 per cent of the vote in 2012, a man was seen casually stuffing ballots as he greeted acquaintances. In the Primorsk region, a woman tried to shove a pile of ballots into an urn.
The regional electoral commission nullified the results at a polling station in the Moscow suburb of Lyubertsy after ballot stuffing was caught on camera.
Meanwhile, at a polling place in Kemerovo, which is known for suspiciously high turnouts, a woman obscured the camera’s view with balloons as electoral workers began pouring ballots out on a table for counting.
But involuntary voting likely had the greatest effect on results. Golos, an independent electoral monitor, received complaints that state employees had been forced to the polls under threat of firing and voters had been bussed to polling stations en masse.
But apathy appeared widespread, especially among young voters. ‘‘There’s no point in voting because the result is already clear,’’ said Alexei Kursky, 19, a student.
"When Russia indiscriminately and without evidence is accused of something, all that the Russian people do is come together around a centre of power. The centre of power today is Putin."
Andrei Kondrashov, Vladimir Putin's campaign spokesman