Paul
Goble
Staunton, September 15 – Nearly a
half century ago, Jerome Gilison analyzed soviet elections as a measure of
dissent by looking at “the missing one percent,” the tiny share of voters in
the union republics who did not vote for the Communist Party list (American Political Science Review, no. 3
(1968).
Now that Vladimir Putin has
re-Sovietized the electoral system in Russia and thus discredited elections as
a means for the population to influence political outcomes (on these two
trends, see respectively grani.ru/opinion/petrov/m.244278.html
and vestnikcivitas.ru/news/3864), observers
are being forced back to a similar approach.
Some are focusing on the rare
victories of the systemic opposition, others are focusing on the ranking of the
various parties systemic and otherwise, and still a third group on the way in
which the elections, for all their shortcomings, have at least had Russians
talking about the situation in their own country rather than the situation in
Ukraine (ej.ru/?a=note&id=28596).
But one pattern has received
relatively little attention, perhaps because as usual, trends and events that
take place beyond the ring road of the Russian capital almost always do, and
that pattern is this: In a variety of ways including record low levels of
participation and “against all” voting, the Kremlin’s party of power is “losing
the periphery.”
That phrase is the subtitle of an
article by Ramazan Magomedov about the course of the elections in Daghstan. There,
he writes, United Russia won in Makhachkala and some of the smaller
municipalities, but the party of power lost and lost big in several of the
larger regional centers (kavpolit.com/articles/vybory_v_dagestane_edinorossy_terjajut_periferiju-19899/).
The biggest of these losses was in
Buynaksk where United Russia’s candidates received only 18.6 percent of the vote. That happened, Magomedov says, because of the
successful campaign of the Party of Veterans of Russia, which was formed in
2012 and gained strength after the Crimean Anschluss.
That party’s leadership did well in
Bakchisaray and decided to focus its efforts in Daghestan in Buynaksk, where
the incumbents had been in office for a long time and where mounting problems
had alienated much of the population. It thus ran less for anything in
particular than against the office holders.
The Party of Veterans of Russia
received 68.8 percent of the vote, almost four times as many as United Russia,
and it will receive “at a minimum,” 12 of the 21 seats in the city council.
United Russia pulled out all the
stops during the campaign but none of its administrative powers helped:
Opponents pointed to numerous violations on the day of voting as well as
pro-incumbent thugs who beat up those waiting to vote and a system in which
United Russia activists paid people to vote for that party.
In Babayurt, the KPRF won, although
by only a tiny fraction of a percent; but as in Buynaksk, the election was
marked by violence and injuries. And in
Kizlyar, United Russia also suffered a defeat as seven other parties received
more than five percent of the vote and gained seats in the city council.
United Russia did win in the
republic capital, garnering 60 percent of the vote across the city, but by near
universal consent, “the elections [there] were far from honest.” Sometimes
ballots were destroyed; at others, they were simply excluded if it appeared
that any opposition group was going to get many votes; and occasionally
pro-United Russia voters were allowed to cast more than one ballot.
For all these reasons, Rasul
Kaliyev, a lawyer in Daghestan, says that the United Russia victory there is
hollow because in reality, “the level of legitimacy of ‘United Russia’ in
Makhachkala did not reach 15 percent,” let alone the 60 percent the party
claimed and officials registered (kavpolit.com/articles/vybory-19885/).
An even more general problem with
this round of elections that the victory of United Russia in the big cities and
its losses outside them was record low participation across the board. Because elections were so falsified earlier
and because so many opposition candidates were excluded by legal chicanery, in
many places, few people voted (kavkaz-uzel.ru/articles/268902/).
That created a problem for election
officials: They had to decide whether enough people had shown up to make the
elections valid. Throughout the country and apparently on order, they did so
even though in many cases, it was far from clear whether a sufficient number of
people had gone to the polls.
Finally, in this brief survey of
election problems, there is the case of the Wepsy village of Sheltozer, where
voters overwhelmingly cast their ballots “against all” the candidates and where
republic officials are blaming outside agitators for this legal action and
threatening local people with criminal punishments (forum-msk.org/material/news/10991110.html).
What the residents of Sheltozer did
was entirely legal – Karelia restored the “against all” line for municipal
elections earlier this year – but the pro-regime incumbent was furious because “against
all” received twice as many votes as he did, despite a mass influx of regime
officials and the intimidating presence of pro-regime popular militias.
Almost as soon as the polls closed
and the votes were counted, Karelia’s central election commission struck back,
saying that the voting in Sheltozer had been disrupted by “an organized group
of people,” that they would be found, and brought to justice for their “’illegal’
agitation for the candidate ‘against all.’”
Aleksandr Stepanov, a KPRF deputy in
Karelia’s legislative assembly, came out in defense of the voters. He said that
they had done nothing wrong or illegal and that he and his party want to defend
them against the overreaching actions of the pro-regime candidate and his
supporters in Petrozavodsk.
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