Russian election concludes
MOSCOW — Early results in Russia’s parliamentary elections showed a rise in opposition to President Vladimir Putin’s governing party, though it was nevertheless expected to cruise to victory.
In partial results released from about 30% of the country’s polling stations after three days of voting ended Sunday, Putin’s United Russia party carried 45% of the vote for the 225 members apportioned by party lists, according to the elections commission.
The body’s other 225 lawmakers will be chosen in individual races, and the elections commission said early results showed United Russia candidates in the lead for 179 of those seats.
The election is widely seen as an important part of Putin’s efforts to cement his grip on power ahead of the 2024 presidential election.
The Communist Party received about 22% of the party-list vote, a sizeable improvement from the 13% it got in the previous election in 2016. United Russia got about 54% five years ago, so the early results indicate a substantial drop in support.
Russian elections are not free and fair, and parliament’s role in recent years has mainly been to rubber-stamp the Kremlin’s initiatives while providing a veneer of democratic legitimacy to Putin’s rule.
Over the weekend, videos of ballot-stuffing and other apparent instances of fraud circulated widely on social media. And the opposition’s uphill battle was complicated by decisions from Google and Apple to comply with Russian government demands to block access to content that was supposed to coordinate the protest vote.
But allies of imprisoned opposition leader Alexei Navalny had hoped to use the elections to deliver a rebuke to Putin by consolidating the opposition.
The multiday nature of the elections — officially part of measures implemented to reduce the spread of the coronavirus — increased the likelihood of fraud by making the process harder to monitor, election observers and Kremlin critics said.
The weekend’s elections came amid a crackdown on dissent by the Kremlin and murmurings of popular discontent. Authorities barred most well-known opposition figures from running for parliament, while forcing many dissidents into exile and declaring popular independent media outlets to be “foreign agents.”
After Google and Apple on Friday removed from their stores a smartphone app connected to Navalny’s movement, Google over the weekend went further, apparently complying with a government request to block YouTube videos and Google documents that Navalny’s allies were using to coordinate voting across the country’s 225 electoral districts.
Google did not respond Sunday to a request for comment. Navalny’s allies, who are organizing the campaign from abroad, said they were notified by Google that their content could be blocked because of a government request.
“This content is not available on this country domain due to a legal complaint from the government,” a YouTube message says when users in Russia try to open one of the blocked videos.
Google’s compliance with Russian demands in recent days has represented an unusual concession for a company that prides itself on enabling the open exchange of information. In Russia, Google’s products — in particular, YouTube — have helped provide avenues for free expression even as the Kremlin has rolled back democratic freedoms.
Specific threats of prosecution against some of Google’s more than 100 employees inside Russia forced the company to take down the Navalny smartphone app, a person familiar with the decision told The New York Times on Friday. Russian courts in recent months have outlawed Navalny’s movement as extremist and declared his campaign to be illegal.
Nevertheless, Navalny’s allies have been pushing the tactic they call “smart voting” to pool opposition votes and elect as many challengers to United Russia as possible, no matter the challengers’ political views. Their effort garnered support among opposition-minded voters, many of whom managed to find out which candidates the “smart voting” campaign supported despite the tech giants’ compliance with Russian government demands.
Navalny’s network on Sunday urged Russians to turn out and vote against United Russia.
“Today is the day your vote really matters,” the network said in a message in his name posted on his Instagram account. “Because today is the day that each of us can be especially efficient in convincing the doubters.”
ELECTION-TAMPERING REPORTS
Opposition parties and observers reported ballot-stuffing and other tampering during the elections. The nonpartisan election monitor Golos on Sunday reported nearly 3,800 possible violations, including ballot-stuffing and possible vote-buying.
Golos also criticized the decision to hold the voting over three days, saying it left ballots vulnerable to interference over two nights. The election monitor reported sealed plastic envelopes for vote storage being tampered with and containers with ballots being stored in rooms with no video surveillance.
Videos of units for overnight storage of votes showed that seals on rear doors could easily be peeled off and replaced.
Golos also reported intimidation of observers by elections officials or thugs.
In St. Petersburg, some independent election observers were removed from polling stations and detained by police right before votes were counted. One observer, Ksenia Frolova, was detained after filing numerous complaints about irregularities.
“We discovered that the same person cast a vote several times at different polling stations,” Frolova, 18, a biology student, said shortly after being released from a police station. “I feel morally exhausted. You just feel that none of your complaints mattered.”
Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov on Saturday described the alleged tampering as “criminal” and called for police to investigate.
“There are huge violations of the law by the authorities,” he said.
“With all of this, I do not rule out the possibility of mass protests,” Zyuganov said. “I am convinced that people will not tolerate the brazen substitution of their choice.”
Last year, widespread fraud in the presidential election in neighboring Belarus set off huge street protests — an outcome that analysts say the Kremlin is determined to prevent from occurring in Russia. Buses of riot police officers were stationed around central Moscow throughout the weekend, but there were no significant protests.
Ella Pamfilova, chief of the Central Elections Commission, said the number of violations was lower than in previous elections. She said 12 cases of ballot-stuffing had been confirmed.
Mikhail Davydov, the head of the Interior Ministry’s main department for the protection of public order, said there were no violations significant enough to affect the elections.
The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe did not send observers because Russian authorities imposed restrictions on their activities.
PUTIN, NOT PARTY
Ahead of the election, Putin expressed hope that the United Russia party would continue its dominance in the parliament, where it held 334 seats out of 450. But although the party is Putin’s power base, it is far less popular than the president himself.
Authorities appeared to be pulling out all the stops to get the typical United Russia base to the polls, including public-sector workers, members of the military and security services, and pensioners. In central Moscow on Friday, groups of men in civilian clothes, all with similar, tightly cropped haircuts, lined up outside a polling station that covers the Russian Defense Ministry.
Some acknowledged they were members of the military and that they had been “strongly advised” by their commanders to vote Friday. Others said they had been given time off to vote before the weekend, which they planned to spend out of town.
And while the party appears to have lost some support, many Russians continue to back Putin. Outside a Moscow polling place, Tatyana Kolosova, 46, said she had voted against United Russia to inject some “competition into the political sphere.” She said she hoped for a government shake-up that would result in more being done to reduce unemployment and to support private business.
But she dismissed Navalny as “an enemy of our country” and promised to vote for Putin if he runs for a fifth term in 2024, recalling the relative poverty and chaos of the 1990s, before he came to power.
“I’m thankful that God gave us such a leader,” she said.