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Vladimir Superman Putin

Riding the Cronies to Victory

By Uwe Klussmann in Moscow

Vladimir Putin's United Russia party swept to a landslide victory on Sunday. The result is hardly surprising given the amount of power and control the president has. But what happens next?

It was to be a sportsmanlike affair, the president promised. He wanted to come out on top of an "honest fight," Vladimir Putin told the delegates of his party United Russia on Oct. 1. The applause was long and loud, and then the party chose Putin as its lead candidate for the parliamentary elections. Two weeks later, Putin was granted three hours of face time on both state-run television channels -- the other candidates were nowhere to be seen.

The TV spot masqueraded as an opportunity for citizens to call in and ask questions directly of the head of state. But in the provinces, Putin supporters took off their gloves: Putin-appointed governors ordered their deputies to make sure the election results were to the liking of the Kremlin. In companies, universities and army barracks, bosses pressured their underlings to "vote correctly." As if that weren't enough, opposition politician Garry Kasparov was arrested and imprisoned for five days shortly before Russians went to the polls.

Not surprisingly, Putin got the results he wanted. With 98 percent of the precincts reporting, United Russia scored a landslide victory with 64.1 percent of the vote. The pro-Kremlin party Just Russia received 7.6 percent and the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party led by Vladimir Zhirinovsky, likewise supporters of Putin, scored 8.2 percent -- meaning that the Putin camp came away with roughly 80 percent support on Sunday.

Even the Opposition Is Loyal

Opposition parties meanwhile failed miserably. Yabloko and SPS, both liberal parties, hardly managed to win more than 1 percent of the vote and will not send representatives to the Duma, Russia's parliament. Indeed, the only halfway independent party to make it over the 7 percent hurdle -- the result parties have to achieve to be able to send representatives to the Duma -- were the Communists. But even they have often shown themselves to be loyal to Putin, particularly when it comes to foreign policy.

The vote for Putin was particularly strong in Chechnya and Ingushetia. The voter turnout of 99 and 98 percent respectively points to a revival of Soviet manipulation practices. No one in Russia believes that Putin and his party are more popular in impoverished villages in the Caucasus plagued by rampant unemployment.

Indeed, many seem to think that the Kremlin may have overdone things. It's not just the opposition that is unimpressed. Discomfort with the election is evident in wide swaths of Russian society, even including Russian security forces. The overwhelming majority of Russians, one survey puts it at 69 percent, suspected even before the election that the results would be manipulated. In a survey by Moscow's Levada Institute, 94 percent of those polled said they had "absolutely no influence" on politics in their country.

Disdain for the West

At the same time the polls show that around a third of Russians think the Soviet system was better than Western democracy. The poverty and chaos that characterized much of the 1990s led to severe skepticism of political plurality in the country. Many were humiliated by the way US-friendly politicians allowed the country to be at the mercy of the International Monetary Fund.

Western-supported chaos on Russia's borders, particularly in Ukraine and Georgia, has led many to further question foreign advice. When Putin points to Bush's unhappy Baghdad expedition and announces that Russians don't need "democracy like in Iraq," he can be sure of their resounding approval.

But the Russian disdain for the West conceals a homemade dilemma. United Russia, which hardly has any active local chapters, was only able to mobilize a fraction of its 1.7 million members. There have been reports that regional party organizations have used massive amounts of state money and administrative staff to compensate for the weaknesses of the "party of the powerful."

United Russia has therefore degenerated -- now more than ever -- into an instrument for regional leaders. Sunday's election result is above all a carte blanche for bureaucrats at every level. Putin admitted during the campaign that "all kinds of crooks" were hitching their carts to the party now celebrating an unprecedented triumph in Russia.