The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Putin handily wins fourth term in office
Forced voting, ballot-box stuffing among complaints.
The vote was tainted by reports of ballot-box stuffing and forced voting, but the complaints will likely do little to undermine the Russian leader.
MOSCOW — Early results and an exit poll showed that Vladimir Putin handily won a fourth term as Russia’s president Sunday, adding six years in the Kremlin for the man who has led the world’s largest country for all of the 21st century.
The vote was tainted by widespread reports of ballot-box stuffing and forced voting, but the complaints will likely do little to undermine Putin. The Russian leader’s popularity remains high despite his suppression of dissent and reproach from the West over Russia’s increasingly aggressive stance in world affairs and alleged interference in the 2016 U.S. election.
Putin’s main challenges in the vote were to obtain a huge margin of victory in order to claim an indisputable mandate. The Central Elections Commission said Putin had won about 72 percent of the vote, based on a count of 22 percent of the country’s precincts.
Russian authorities had sought to ensure a large turnout to bolster the image that Putin’s so-called “managed democracy” is robust and offers Russians true choices.
He faced seven minor candidates on the ballot. Putin’s most vehement foe, anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny, was rejected as a candidate because he was convicted of fraud in a case widely regarded as politically motivated.
Navalny and his supporters had called for an election
boycott but the extent of its success could not immediately be gauged.
The election came amid escalating tensions between Russia and the West, with reports that Moscow was behind the nerve-agent poisoning of a former Russian double agent in Britain and that its internet trolls had mounted an extensive campaign to undermine the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Britain and Russia last week announced diplomat expulsions over the spy case and the United States issued new sanctions.
Russian officials denounced both cases as efforts to interfere in the Russian election. But the disputes likely worked in Putin’s favor, reinforcing the official stance that the West is infected with “Russophobia” and determined to undermine both Putin and Russian cultural values.
The election took place on the fourth anniversary of Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea from Ukraine, one of the most dramatic manifestations of Putin’s drive to reassert Russia’s power.
Crimea and Russia’s subsequent
support of separatists in eastern Ukraine led to an array of U.S. and European sanctions that, along with falling oil prices, damaged the Russian economy and slashed the ruble’s value by half. But Putin’s popularity remained strong, apparently buttressed by nationalist pride.
Casting his ballot in Moscow, Putin was confident of victory, saying he would consider any percentage of votes a success.
“The program that I propose for the country is the right one,” he declared.
Given the lack of real competition in the presidential race, authorities had to struggle against voter apathy and in the process put many of Russia’s nearly 111 million voters under intense pressure to cast ballots.
Yevgeny, a 43-year-old mechanic voting in central Moscow, said he briefly wondered whether it was worth voting.
“But the answer was easy ... if I want to keep working, I vote,” he said.
He spoke on condition that his last name not be used out of concern that his employer — the Moscow city government — would find out.
Across the country in the city of Yekaterinburg, a doctor also said she was being coerced to vote.
When she hadn’t voted by midday, “The chief of my unit called me and said I was the only one who hadn’t voted,” said the doctor, Yekaterina, who spoke on condition her last name not be used because she also feared repercussions.