Putin, who says his goal is to defend Russia from foreign influences, served two terms as president from 2000 to 2008 and will now serve a six-year term ending in 2018. Fraud allegations in Dec. 4 parliamentary elections that saw Putin’s United Russia party win nearly 50 percent of the vote resulted in a series of “Arab Spring”-like anti-government protests in Moscow.
OPPOSITION SAYS PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION FRAUGHT WITH FRAUD
BY SERGEI L. LOIKO
LOS ANGELES TIMES
MOSCOW — As tens of thousands of supporters chanted his name at a wintry outdoor rally, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin declared victory in the Russian presidential election.
But opponents of Putin promised to respond with their own mass rallies beginning today to highlight vote fraud allegations and ongoing government corruption.
Election officials said Sunday that the prime minister held nearly 65 percent of the vote with almost two-thirds counted.
Putin, who served two previous terms as president before becoming premier in 2008, led four rivals including Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov, who had 17 percent, according to the preliminary tabulations of Russia’s Central Election Commission.
“I asked you once if we would win and we did win!” shouted Putin as the large crowd in Manezhnaya Square chanted: “Putin, Putin, Putin!”
The 59-year-old president-elect asserted that the campaign proved “an open and fair struggle” and that by placing him back in the presidency, Russian voters were rejecting anti-government forces seeking to “dismantle the Russian statehood and usurp power.”
But many vehemently disagreed.
“It is clear that the slim hopes that the election could be fair have not come true and as we expected the vote was conducted with massive serious violations,” said Grigory Melkonyants, deputy executive director of Golos, a Moscow-based election monitoring association. “The falsifications were multi-level.”
Zyuganov refused to accept the tally, saying “the entire state machine, corrupt inside out, was working for one man on the ballot, Vladimir Putin.”
Another presidential hopeful, metals billionaire and NBA team owner Mikhail Prokhorov, said he would file court action. Prokhorov, whose campaign team had placed observers in polling stations throughout Russia, cited numerous violations in favor of Putin.
With 65 percent of the vote counted, the Central Election Commission said Putin had 64.66 percent, Zyuganov with 17.1 percent and Prokhorov with 6.5 percent. But many Moscow voting stations had yet to be counted, and in two checked at random, Putin had no more than 41.7 percent of the vote.
Putin, who says his goal is to defend Russia from foreign influences, served two terms as president from 2000 to 2008 and will now serve a six-year term ending in 2018. Fraud allegations in Dec. 4 parliamentary elections that saw Putin’s United Russia party win nearly 50 percent of the vote resulted in a series of “Arab Spring”-like anti-government protests in Moscow.