Putin's party wins crushing victory

Vladimir Putin’s party won a crushing victory in Russia’s parliamentary elections, paving the way for the leader to remain in control even after he steps down as president.

Among the winners was Andrei Lugovoi, a former KGB officer and chief suspect in the poisoning death of Kremlin critic Alexander Litvinenko in London last year.

Yesterday’s vote followed a tense Kremlin campaign that relied on a combination of persuasion and intimidation to ensure victory for the United Russia party and for President Putin, who has used a flood of oil revenues to move his country on to a more assertive position on the global stage.

“The vote affirmed the main idea: that Vladimir Putin is the national leader, that the people support his course, and this course will continue,” party leader and Parliament Speaker Boris Gryzlov said.

Several opposition leaders accused the Kremlin of rigging the vote, and US President George Bush’s administration called for a probe into voting irregularities.

Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov called the election “the most irresponsible and dirty” in the post-Soviet era.

The Kremlin portrayed the election as a plebiscite on Putin’s nearly eight years as president – with the promise that a major victory would allow him somehow to remain leader after his second term ends next year.

Putin is constitutionally prohibited from running for a third consecutive term, but he clearly wants to stay in power. A movement has sprung up in recent weeks to urge him to become a “national leader”, though what duties and powers that would entail are unclear.

Pollsters said United Russia’s performance would give it an overwhelming majority of 306 seats in the 450-seat State Duma, or lower house. The Communists would have 57 seats.

Two other pro-Kremlin parties – the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party and populist Just Russia – also appeared to have made it into parliament.

One Liberal Democratic MP will be Lugovoi. Russia has refused to hand him over to Britain, and the Duma seat provides him with immunity from prosecution.

No other parties passed the 7% threshold for gaining seats in the legislature. Both opposition liberal parties were shut out, predicted to win no more than 2-3% of the vote each.

Many Russians complained about being put under pressure to cast their ballots, with teachers, doctors and others saying they had been ordered by their bosses to vote at their workplaces.

“People are being forced and threatened to vote; otherwise they won’t get their salaries or pensions,” said Boris Nemtsov, leader of the liberal Union of Right Forces party.

Dozens of voters reported being paid to cast ballots for United Russia, said Alexander Kynev, a political expert with election monitoring group Golos. In the town of Pestovo in the western Novgorod region, voters complained they were given ballots already filled out for United Russia, he said.

In Chechnya, where turnout was over 99%, witnesses reported seeing election authorities filling out and casting ballots in the suburbs of the regional capital, Grozny.

There was a tense, subdued mood at some polling stations. Yelena, a 32-year-old manager in St Petersburg, refused to give her last name out of fear of official retaliation for voting for the liberal Yabloko party.

“We live in a country with an absence of democracy and freedom of speech,” she said.

Many voters were reluctant to discuss their vote – a shift since the late 1980s, when Russians complained loudly about their government. One elderly woman, a veteran of a defence research institute, refused to give her name and only admitted that she had voted for Yabloko when she was certain no one else was listening.

The authorities, she said, would not let Yabloko win seats.

“That’s why we have about 300 fools, I’m sorry to say, in our Duma,” she said. “And I don’t believe Putin: He is an ordinary man, we must not give him absolute power.”

The Kremlin appeared determined to engineer a resounding victory. But Putin, credited with rebuilding Russia after the poverty and uncertainty of the 1990s, has support from many Russians.

“Today everything is clear and stable in life. The president’s words always coincide with what he does. As for the other candidates we don’t know yet where they would take us to,” said Raisa Tretyakova, a 61-year-old pensioner in St Petersburg.