Voting in Russia
Rebecca Small, who teaches in Virginia, pointed out this article before I even got around to looking at the news this morning. This is from the Washington Post. Thank you, Rebecca.It's hard to imagine that Medvedev and United Russia are in any danger of failing this "mid-term test."
Russian regional vote is mid-term test for Medvedev
Millions of Russians voted in regional elections on Sunday [today] in a mid-term test of President Dmitry Medvedev's pledge to loosen the Kremlin's grip on the political system.
Regional and municipal votes across the country were set to gauge the popularity of the ruling United Russia party amid anger at rising prices and unemployment after the global crisis abruptly ended 10 years of rapid economic growth...
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Labels: elections, parties, Russia
posted by Ken Wedding @ 10:17 AM
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Pro-Kremlin Party on Top, but Opposition Gains Seats
"The pro-Kremlin party, United Russia, has again dominated regional elections, according to preliminary results released Monday, though opposition parties have made slight gains in a vote that has been seen as a test of President Dmitri A. Medvedev’s call for greater political pluralism in Russia...
"While the slight dip in United Russia’s fortunes was attributed to economic discontent, the fact that the dip was allowed to occur was most likely a result of Kremlin pressure on the party to allow more local political competition, political analysts said...
"On the whole, the Communist Party, which is the only viable opposition to United Russia not completely co-opted by the Kremlin, fared well...
"Though it seems unlikely that United Russia will lose its commanding position anytime soon — in some regional parliamentary elections on Sunday, the party won over 60 percent of the vote — the Kremlin now realizes that it needs at least 'the appearance of opposition,' Boris Makarenko, the director of Moscow’s Center for Political Technologies, a nonpartisan consulting group, said.
"Otherwise, he said, 'you will no longer be able to pretend you have a multiparty system and democracy.'"
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