- Title: RUSSIA: Russians vote in parliamentary elections
- Date: 3rd December 2007
- Summary: (BN09) YUZHNOE BUTOVO, SOUTHWEST OF MOSCOW, RUSSIA (DECEMBER 2, 2007) (REUTERS) ANDREI LUGOVOY, DEPUTY LEADER OF THE NATIONALIST LDPR PARTY, WITH THE HELP OF HIS SON PLACING VOTE IN BALLOT BOX
- Embargoed: 18th December 2007 12:00
- Keywords:
- Topics: Domestic Politics
- Reuters ID: LVA1V7UM3SILDDTCO3XG58TACXR0
- Story Text: Russians vote in parliamentary elections against a backdrop of fierce criticism from opposition parties that President Putin's Kremlin enjoys an unfair advantage. First official results show Putin's United Russia party winning 62.8 percent of vote. Communists to file complaint against Putin's victory.
Residents of Russia's remote far east kicked off the voting for a new parliament in sub-zero temperatures on Sunday (December 2). Khabarovsk in northeastern Russia was among the first of 96,000 polling stations to open across the sprawling nation in an election that is overshadowed by opposition accusations that pro-Kremlin forces enjoy an unfair advantage.
More than 100 million Russians are eligible to vote in an election widely viewed as a referendum on President Vladimir Putin.
First official results showed Putin's United Russia party winning 62.8 percent of vote.
Increasingly marginalised opposition parties have said numerous election rule changes, heavily skewed media coverage, repeated instances of government pressure on voters and Putin's own campaigning have made the contest unfair.
Gennady Zyuganov, leader of the Russia's Communist party, the main rival to Putin's United Russia, said after casting his vote, "These are the hardest elections ever, the dirtiest and most irresponsible."
Officials from the Communist party later said the party would file a complaint with Russia's highest court.
Russian most vocal opposition leader Garry Kasparov,along with another Kremlin critic Eduard Lemonov, spoiled their ballot papers crossing out all the contenders in a gesture of protest against Kremlin dominated election campaign.
"I urge all of you to use word election very cautiously because you cannot call it election. Either you call it election without selection,"
Kasparov told reporters outside the polling station. "People are scared because it was a fear campaign around Russia telling the people no matter what you do there we will know. So the government was trying to use this genetic fear that had been accumulated over decades in the Soviet Union telling the people you cannot hide from us. And that's why they used every dirty trick in the book," he said.
The former world chess champion and leader of the Other Russia opposition party was arrested in Moscow a week before the polls when police broke up a march of about 3,000 protesters.
Putin's opponents accuse the Kremlin chief of squelching the freedoms won after the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union and of creating what they say is an unstable political system dependent on Putin alone.
Putin has said the elections will be completely democratic. He has attacked foreigners for "poking their snotty noses" into Russia's internal affairs and accused opposition politicians of being stooges for Western powers.
Observers from the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe's (OSCE) parliamentary assembly, and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) visited polling stations in Moscow on Sunday.
The OSCE's ODIHR arm, which runs election observation missions, scrapped plans in mid-November to monitor Russia's parliamentary polls, citing obstruction by the Russian authorities including a failure to issue observers with entry visas.
Only about 300 foreign observers, roughly half of them from former Soviet republics, have been accredited for the election. The Kremlin says checks by foreign monitors are unnecessary because Russia has high standards of democracy.
Lilia Shibanova, Executive Director of Golos, a coalition of NGOs that is monitoring the vote, told Reuters that there have been problems with absentee voter's certificates.
She said, "We see massive voting with absentee voter's certificates. A great number of people vote using absentee voter's certificates. This is a new thing within this campaign.....We also had a lot of instances when our correspondents were not allowed at polling stations.
Many station do not allow to take photographs or film. This is totally illegal,"
Anti-Western leader of the Nationalist Liberal Democratic Party Of Russia (LDPR) Valdimir Zhirinovsky, cast his vote in Moscow. Zhirinovsky polished his anti-Western credentials by recruiting Andrei Lugovoy -- wanted by British police as a suspect in the high-profile murder of Alexander Litvinenko -- as No. 2 on the party list.
Lugovoy has maintained that the accusation he murdered Litvinenko with a toxic radioactive isotope was fabricated in an elaborate plot by British intelligence to discredit Russia.
In the past eight years Russians have enjoyed an economic boom driven by high oil and commodity prices. Many Russians like Putin's tough-guy image and nationalistic rhetoric, including fierce criticism of the West, crediting him with restoring Moscow's influence abroad after the chaotic 1990s.
"What he (Putin) has done in the last years, what he has managed to correct - there are no others like him. And I think he will take his achievements even further in the near future," Gennady Belyshchev, a Moscow resident told Reuters.
Putin aims to retain influence after stepping down as president next year. It is not clear how he will do that, but he is heading the United Russia candidates' list and wants a strong mandate from voters to bolster his political future - Copyright Holder: REUTERS
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