Russian parliamentary elections: legitimate results or fraud?

Opposition rallies held in Moscow and St.-Petersburg after the parliamentary elections can seriously spoil the ruling party’s ‘triumph’. According to the media, in Moscow alone some 600 were detained, including such opposition leaders as Alexei Navalniy, Ilya Yashin, Boris Nemtsov, and Eduard Limonov. The latter two were released while the two former were sentenced to 15 days for ‘failure to obey police’s legal orders’. Navalniy has already filed an appeal stipulating that the court’s decision was based on falsified evidence, the appeal, however, was dismissed. In the meantime people’s discontent with election frauds – mostly denied by the ruling party and the Central Election Committee – is growing exponentially. Some 35,000 Facebook and Vkontakte (Russian analogue of Facebook social web) users expressed their intention to go to the demonstration in Moscow due to be held this Saturday organized by the ‘Solidarnost’ (“Solidarity”) – Russian liberal democratic political movement. As the founder of Vkontakte web-page, Pavel Durov, told journalists, the FSB has been pressuring him to block all opposition group-pages within his network, he, however, refuses to do so, ‘Echo Moskvy’ reports. The Internet is swirling with eye-witness reports and videos claiming to prove numerous blatant frauds and falsifications during the elections, the officials, however, discharge the videos as ultimately falsified while the Central Election Committee refuses to accept any video-evidence of alleged violations. According to various media reports, Internal Troops, namely the ‘Dzerzhinsky Division’, are being drawn up to Moscow – officially, to protect the citizens from possible radical nationalist riots.

The opposition ‘Yabloko’ party that did not pass the 5% barrier according to official election results but in fact won some 20% as the oppositionists claim refused to recognize the election results and expressed its intention to address the court as well as to join the demonstration planned for Saturday. Another opposition party – Russian Communist Party – that occupies the second place in official ratings, also called the elections ‘illegal’ and ‘falsified’. However, none of the three opposition parties that passed to the State Duma of the 6th convocation agreed to follow the call of  ‘Yabliko’s’ leader Grigoriy Yavlinskiy and to resign their mandates in protest against election frauds.

The leader of the ‘Just Russia’ party that enjoyed unexpected success in the elections, Sergeey Mironov, was less critical of the election results: according to him serious frauds were committed only in St.-Petersburg and Astrakhan.

“I believe there were a lot of blatant frauds and manipulations there. For example, in Astrakhan our party member Oleg Sheyen is the most popular political figure. Nevertheless, we won only some 15,000 votes there, while “United Russia” won more than 80,000. I believe this falsification was conducted under direct orders from Astrakhan mayor Bajenov – who I believe will not end up well. There were other blatant violations there – observers were expelled from polling stations, votes were falsified... The same goes for St.-Petersburg. We have exit-poll data stipulating that we were winning, but it seems that the ‘United Russia’ partisans believe they can do anything they want. I’ll list some of these striking violations: the assault and battery of a General Court deputy Sergei Nilov by police officers right in the polling station, sudden ballot paper shortages in some polling stations at 15:00, when the turnout was only 25% - this can only mean mass ballot frauds. The Petersburg ‘United Russia’ partisans did more harm than good to their beloved party and to our country’s leaders by all these actions. And now Petersburg is disgraced in the whole world as a city that falsifies elections,” Mironov told the press-conference ‘Election’s outcome” organized by the Interfax media agency. Nevertheless, he noted several ‘positive aspects’ of the elections: “Our result is two times better than in the previous elections in 2007. Our party now has more parliamentary seats, so I would like to sincerely thank all those who voted for us, who trust us”. Fccjrding to Mironov, it is real evidence of the political progress in our country, of the truly multi-party rule of the 6th Duma.

An Interfax press conference was attended by representatives of all four parties that enter the parliament according to the elections results (however, the final  results are still to be announced on Friday).
The Liberal Democratic Party of Russia regards the election’s results as generally positive. According to Igor Lebedev, head of the LDPR fraction in the 5th Duma, if one takes into account the conditions under which we led our election campaign and under which the elections took place, the result seems to be positive. “The LDPR enters the 6th State Duma of Russian Federation, as we did in the previous 5 Duma convocations. We have a stable pool of supporters and our result is better by the campaign. Today we can say that we are supported by 20-25% of Russian citizens. In the Far East and Siberia we won 20% and took third position, while in central Russia we took 17%. I would like once again thank our supporters for their votes. New legal regulations introduced to the electoral law by the president had no success, and I think our initial proposals on the subject were more efficient in fighting election fraud. Nevertheless, we had our observers in more than 70 districts of Russia, and I believe it helped prevent some frauds and helped us get the result we have”, Lebedev said.

As another LDPR member, Alexei Ostrovsky, told the journalists, As far as the violations are concerned, he couldn’t comment on them, as his party still had no documents proving or disproving them. “If we collect enough evidence, - Ostrovsky said, - we’ll appeal to the court. But today opposition parties have no opportunity to cover all polling stations with their observers, so if we have our observers in 70% of polling stations in one district, and they say that there we got 20% instead of 11% - the total figure for the district – we still can’t claim that a violation took place, as we have no evidence on the remaining 30% of polling stations. So until all parties have an opportunity to cover all the polling stations in the Russian Federation there is no legal basis to the claims of fraud and election violations. For the moment, we have received no propositions to form coalitions with any of the current parliamentary factions. But we are open to proposals and discussions with all parliamentary forces. But we are ready to do so if we are to be treated as equals”.