Kremlin credits West for election turnout

MOSCOW: The Kremlin gave credit to a surprising source for the outpouring of support for Vladimir Putin in Sunday’s presidential election — the West.

Ella Pamfilova, chairwoman of the Central Election Commission, said pressure on Russia from Western leaders helped to generate the 76.7% support for Mr Putin.

“Our people always unite when the chips are down,” Ms Pamfilova said on live television, in what appeared to be a reference to what Britain has said was a Russian nerve agent attack on one of its former spies, Sergei Skripal, and his daughter in Salisbury, England.

“That’s why a big thanks to certain leaders, I won’t name them, of Western states, who also made their positive contribution, which contributed to the consolidation and unification of our people,” she said.

Mr Putin’s campaign spokesman, Andrei Kondrashov, was more explicit, saying: “Thanks to Britain, they’ve ensured a level of turnout we weren’t hoping to achieve by ourselves.”

The Kremlin propaganda machine swung into action spreading that same message, that the results of the vote Sunday were a rebuke to the West and a sign that Russia cannot be intimidated and should not be threatened.

“Before he was simply our president and he could be changed. But now he is our ‘vozhd’,” Margarita Simonyan, editorin-chief of the Kremlin’s main foreign-language bullhorn, the RT broadcast network, wrote on Twitter. “And we will not allow him to be changed. And you did this yourselves.”

Vozhd is an old Russian word for chieftain, most commonly applied to Soviet rulers such as Vladimir Lenin and Josephh Stalin.

Some commentators found parallels between the vote Sunday and its Soviet-era antecedents. There was no real competition and no concrete discussion of issues. The front-runner neither participated in any debates nor laid out a campaign platform.

“The election results should be compared not with democracies, but with the Soviet Union,” Ivan Kurilla, a historian, wrote on Facebook. “Back then it was 99.9%, and now it’s 75%. It’s precisely by that 24% that today’s elections are freer than Soviet ones.”

Observers from the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe also found the entire process wanting, if well-organised.

“Overall, the campaign was marked by a lack of genuine competition among contestants,” the group’s election observation mission said.

There were also some complaints about irregularities. A few videos of ballot stuffing appeared, although the results from a couple such polling stations were quickly nullified. But critics worried about more sophisticated techniques.

One of those was the new “absentee voting” system that allowed people to vote where they were physically rather than where they were registered.

One opposition organiser who said he managed to vote twice using the system was immediately charged with a misdemeanour. But that left open the question of how many people might have been able to abuse the system.

The “electoral sultanates” that previously produced whopping numbers for Putin also seemed to have curbed their enthusiasm.

In previous years the Republic of Chechnya, for example, habitually awarded Putin more than 99% of the vote with more than 99% turnout. This year it was a slightly more temperate 91.5% on both scales.

Overall, Mr Putin received a historic 56.4 million votes out of more than 110 million eligible voters. Turnout was 67.5%. The closest candidate to him was Pavel Grudinin from the Communist Party with 11.78%, followed by Vladimir Zhirinovsky, a right-wing nationalist, with 5.65%. Ksenia Sobchak, the only woman, attracted 1.68%.

What effort Mr Putin did make toward defining the next six years and his fourth term as president came in a March 1 state of the nation address, in which he promised to sharply increase social spending and to develop a whole new generation of nuclear weapons unlike any the world has ever seen. (Some were operational, he claimed.)

Critics worried that it was all part of a set piece of continued confrontation that started with the annexation of Crimea and the uprising in eastern Ukraine, and continued with the Skripal case.