MOSCOW, Dec 8: Russia woke up to a new political landscape on Monday after liberal parties were all but shut out of the nation’s parliament for the first time in the post-Soviet era.
President Vladimir Putin hailed the result as a step toward democracy, but Western observers called it “overwhelmingly distorted” and Washington expressed concern. The outcome prompted warnings of a return to authoritarian rule.
It could give Mr Putin enough votes to change the constitution so he can run for a third term. It also almost guarantees him a second term in March’s presidential election.
With 91 percent of Sunday’s vote counted, both of the nation’s top liberal parties, Union of Right Forces (SPS) and Yabloko, failed to scrape by the crucial five-percent barrier needed to win seats by proportional representation in the State Duma (the lower house).
The results meant that liberal parties would not be a significant presence in Russia’s law-making body for the first time since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.
The United Russia emerged as the biggest party. Created by the Kremlin for the last election in 1999 to help President Putin’s rise to power, the party won 37.1 percent of the vote. Its slogan was “Together with the President”.
The communists — Mr Putin’s main opposition — had only 12.7 percent, well down from the 24 percent they won in 1999.
Ultra-nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s party — which backs the Kremlin on key issues — won 11.6 percent and Motherland, seen by many as a Kremlin creation to draw off votes from the communists, had 9.1 percent.
That means the pro-Kremlin bloc could get the two-thirds majority needed to change the constitution to allow Mr Putin a third four-year term — although he ruled that out in June.
The vote reflected widespread support for Mr Putin’s efforts to restore central control since succeeding Boris Yeltsin in 2000 and ending the chaos of the early reform years.
“Yesterday’s election shows what the Russian people actually think: they are stridently nationalist, want wealth redistributed and have little interest in liberal or democratic values,” Aton brokerage said in a research note.
The leader of the Communist Party, facing a second death after its rebirth in the chaos of the 1990s, called the election a farce and accused the Kremlin of rigging the vote.
“You are all participants in a revolting spectacle which for some reason is called an election,” Gennady Zyuganov said.
“The democrats no longer exist,” said Olga Kryshtanovskaya, a respected researcher who is a specialist on Russia’s political system.
“The democratic movement has been enfeebled, decapitated, destroyed,” she said.
And their priorities — Western-style reform of the economy, civil liberties, an independent press and criticism of the war in Chechnya — will melt away from parliament debate.
“A Duma without Yabloko and SPS is an absolute catastrophe,” said Sergey Grigoriants of the Glasnost Foundation.
“Those who defend people’s choice, independent press, independent courts, a separation of powers, who have always spoken out for cooperation with Europe... they will be a minority in the State Duma,” said Boris Nemtsov, an SPS leader. —AFP/Reuters