Pro-Kremlin Parties Dominate City Poll
By Galina Stolyarova
Staff Writer
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Alexander Natruskin / Reuters
Veshnyakov speaking on Monday.
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Nearly seventy percent of voters ignored Sunday elections to the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly, and more than 3 percent of those who turned up at polling stations chose to deface their ballots. The St. Petersburg elections, seen as a rehearsal for State Duma elections in December, were the first to be held since the removal of the minimum turnout limit, which was lifted by the Russian parliament in December 2006. Another novelty of the local campaign was the introduction of a proportional electoral system — also known as the party lists system — that requires candidates to run on a registered party list, in contrast to a majoritarian system that allows independent candidates to stand. Preliminary results published by the St. Petersburg Election Commission on its website on Monday show that 33.18 percent of locals took part in the Sunday vote. Pro-Kremlin bloc United Russia received 37.37 percent, giving the party 23 out of the 50 seats in the Assembly. Another pro-Kremlin party, Just Russia, came second, with 21.9 percent translating to 13 seats. The Communist Party won 16.02 percent, equal to 9 seats, and the Liberal Democratic Party gathered 10.82 percent and 5 seats in the parliament. Patriots of Russia and the Union of Right Forces failed to pass a 7 percent margin required to entitle them to seats in the Assembly, having collected 5.8 percent and 5.2 percent of votes cast respectively. A total of 37,501 ballots were declared invalid, according to the commission. The figure significantly exceeded that expected in normal election conditions of less than 1.5 percent, the statistical average of spoilt ballots. Liberal party Yabloko — expelled from the elections on a contested technicality earlier — had asked its supporters to go to polling stations and write the words “protest,” “Yabloko” or other words of disconsent on the ballot. Boris Vishnevsky, a member of the political council of Yabloko branch in St. Petersburg, said it was extremely difficult for the party to deliver this message to the voters. “We used all resources available to us to spread the word about the plan — our volunteers distributed leaflets among voters, but mainstream media attention was scarce.” he said. “Television channels simply refused to give coverage to our initiative. As a result, many people never got to know about it.” Governor Valentina Matviyenko — who openly campaigned for United Russia — was satisfied with the results of the elections. “I was really impressed by the high turnout,” Matviyenko told reporters on Monday. “There will be four parties in the city parliament, which means that we managed to create equal conditions for all rivals.” Her critics, however, do not agree. Maria Matskevich, a senior analyst with the Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, called the election “a triumph of hypocrisy.” “What we got was a cynical trade-off between two pro-Kremlin parties, equally loyal to the president,” Matskevich said. “It was an imitation of choice, and a step toward a fictitious two-party system, with the difference between two cloned parties being only their names. The only genuine and strong opposition party, Yabloko, had been shut out of elections. Nearing the State Duma elections in December, liberal parties were given a clear message.” Alexander Veshnyakov, head of the Central Election Commission, said high voter turnout in St. Petersburg — many experts had predicted less than 25 percent — dispelled the concerns of the critics of electoral reforms made in 2006. “The experts had been concerned about the removal of minimum voter turnout and removal of the ‘against all’ option but these measures are not significant enough to really prevent people from voting,” Veshnyakov told reporters in Moscow on Monday. “The important thing for voters is having a choice.” But Veshnyakov did connect the increased number of invalid ballots with the removal of the “against all” option. “Some people opted to deface the paper as a form of protest vote,” he said. Roman Mogilevsky, head of the Agency for Social Information, said the removal of the minimum turnout threshold resulted in a hands-off attitude from the parties. “The parties are not seeking new voters, not trying to get more people interested in elections but rather they all target one-and-the-same group of people who traditionally go to polling stations,” he said. In the meantime, Vishnevsky said Yabloko is considering an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg to ask it to denounce the results of the elections. Russia joined the European Convention on Human Rights in 1998, and since that time, the French court has become the last resort for its citizens, who have long ago lost faith in Russia’s own judicial system. Nine thousand cases from Russia — from hostilities and torture cases in Chechnya to St. Petersburg pensioners struggling for the right to dry their laundry in a disputed attic — are currently being reviewed, said Moscow lawyer Karina Moskalenko, director of the Center of Assistance for International Protection at a news conference in January.
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