Putin Allies Win Russia Regional Vote as Moscow Turnout Plunges

[Purveyor]

By Stepan Kravchenko and Ilya Arkhipov Sep 15, 2014 5:55 AM ET

President Vladimir Putin’s party won regional elections in Russia, gaining the most seats in Moscow as well as in Crimea, the region the country annexed from Ukraine in March, according to preliminary results.

The ruling United Russia party and its allies won 38 of 45 seats in the Moscow assembly in yesterday’s vote, with a turnout of 21 percent, the lowest during Putin’s rule, state TV reported. The party won almost 71 percent of the vote in Crimea, according to preliminary results published on the local election commission’s website. Turnout in the Black Sea peninsula region was 53 percent, it said.

Putin won the 2012 presidential election, returning to the Kremlin after four years as prime minister amid the biggest protests against his rule. His popularity has rebounded to near record highs since then as the conflict in neighboring Ukraine intensified. The ruling party sees the result as a confirmation of its policies.

“The numbers are impressive,” Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, the leader of United Russia, said at a media forum in Moscow today. “Each of them is a proof that real democracy is present in our lives. We proved the status or the reputation of the party of the majority.”

more...

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-09-15/putin-allies-win-russia-regional-vote-as-moscow-turnout-plunges.html

[EX500rider]

1. Putin...

[pampango]

2. Moscow Times: Russian Regional Election Day Showcases Kremlin Grip

Mass apathy and a scarcity of serious challengers to state-preferred candidates were the recurrent themes of Russia's nationwide voting day on Sunday, which pundits said attested to the Kremlin's tightening grip on all levels of the Russian electoral system.

Voters in 84 of the country's 85 federal subjects were summoned to some 64,000 polling stations to elect 30 regional governors, 14 regional and 21 municipal legislatures, as well as other forms of regional authority. But the scale of the exercise did not match the population's lackluster enthusiasm for Sunday's events, which has been molded by two decades of electoral rigging and the stifling of political alternatives, according to independent observers.

The self-confessed weakness and lack of consolidation within Russia's nonsystemic opposition have created significant problems for candidates that fall outside of the political mainstream, but these factors alone may not account for the lack of true opposition candidates on the ballots, analysts said.

"Even if the nonsystemic opposition members were more active, the situation would be the same," said Andrei Buzin, election-monitoring director at Golos, an independent election monitoring organization. "The level of competition is very low. All the serious challengers were filtered out before they could even run."

http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/election-day-illustrates-firmer-kremlin-grip/507028.html

At least we know that the vote was clean in St Petersburg:

Russian daily Novaya Gazeta reports that far-right EU parties sent monitors to local elections in St Petersburg this weekend. The monitors, many of whom blessed the Crimea referendum in March, came from Austria, Belgium, Germany, Hungary, Italy, and Poland. They said the St Peterbsurg vote was fair despite NGO complaints.

http://euobserver.com/tickers/125622