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Opposition Frozen Out As Russians Vote In Local, Regional Elections

September 12, 2015
by Farangis Najibullah

Voters across Russia will cast ballots in local and regional elections on September 13, with the liberal opposition largely shut out and Kremlin-backed candidates expected to dominate.

A total of 59 million people – nearly half the population – are eligible to vote in an array of races from the Baltic exclave of Kaliningrad to the Russian Far East.

At stake are more than 90,000 legislative seats and 1,300 regional offices, including 21 regional governorships and hundreds of mayoral mandates.

Aside from balloting for the president and national parliament, Russia now holds nearly all its elections on a single day each year.

The voting is seen as a rehearsal for the 2016 elections to the State Duma, or lower parliament house, which precedes a 2018 election in which President Vladimir Putin could seek a fourth term.

The elections will test the mood of the Russian electorate after more than a year of economic troubles caused mainly by low oil prices, Western sanctions over Moscow's interference in Ukraine, and Kremlin countersanctions that have barred imports of many Western foods and increased the country's isolation.

Putin's government has whipped up a wave of patriotic and anti-Western sentiment, and the president's public approval ratings are close to all-time highs.

But nearly half the 187,00 candidates in the various contests are from the ruling, Kremlin-controlled United Russia party, and the authorities have limited the choices for voters by keeping a Democratic Coalition that unites some of Putin's fiercest foes -- and formerly included Boris Nemtsov, who was assassinated in February -- off a number of ballots.

The Democratic Coalition brings together opposition groups including the Parnas party and prominent anticorruption blogger Aleksei Navalny's Party of Progress, which is not registered, and Democratic Choice.

Electoral authorities barred coalition candidates from legislative contests in the Kaluga, Magadan, and Novosibirsk regions, citing technicalities that the opposition said were politically motivated pretexts for shutting its candidates out.

In the Kostroma region, the only place the opposition secured a spot on the ballot, its campaign has faced hurdles ranging from loutish provocateurs disrupting stump speeches to physical abuse and spoiler parties designed to draw votes away.

The Russian NGO Golos, which monitors elections nationally, said it had registered more than 700 suspected cases of electoral fraud.

On September 12, police in Kostroma said they had confiscated 2 million rubles ($30,000) from an activist of the Open Russia nongovernmental organization.

A police statement alleged 'the money was to be paid out to the activists of radical youth groups who were planning unlawful actions' to disrupt the elections.

Central Election Commission Chairman Vladimir Churov said that 'outside forces' were interested in seeing the region's elections fail.

Navalny, Nemtsov, and Ilya Yashin, the top Parnas candidate in Kostroma, were leaders of a protest movement that erupted in 2011 and posed a challenge to the Kremlin but failed to stop Putin from returning to the presidency the following year.

Putin has clamped down on street protesters and civil society during his third term, and Nemtsov's shooting just steps from the Kremlin dealt a blow to the opposition and underscored the risks faced by Russians who oppose the government.

Putin dominates the political scene, and few of the contests across Russia feature prominent figures.

In Tatarstan, some officials and voters hope a high turnout will help the regional leader retain the title of president -- which by law can only be used by the president of the country, Putin.

In Kaliningrad, the expected election of the incumbent governor to a new term is likely to lead to the appointment of Vladimir Yakunin, a close Putin ally who left his long-held post as head of the state railway monopoly last month under murky circumstances, as a representative of the region in Russia's upper parliament house.

Source: http://www.rferl.org/content/russia-regional- elections-opposition-frozen-out/27244237.html

Copyright (c) 2015. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.