MOSCOW (Reuters) – Several thousand protesters took to the streets yesterday to demand an end to Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s 12-year rule after voters cut his party’s parliamentary majority in an election that was condemned as unfair by European monitors.
Police said they detained 300 people in Moscow, where they confronted a crowd of 3,000 to 5,000 chanting “Revolution!” and “Russia without Putin” in one of the biggest opposition protests in the capital in years.
Police scuffled with some protesters and formed a line to hem them in and prevent them marching towards the Kremlin. Some managed to break away and head towards the seat of power, but at least 30 were seized before they got there.
The Central Election Commission said the prime minister’s United Russia party was set to have 238 deputies in the 450-seat State Duma after Sunday’s vote, compared with 315 seats in the current lower house.
The result was Putin’s worst election setback since he came to power 12 years ago and signalled growing weariness with his domination of Russian politics as he prepares to reclaim the presidency in an election next March.
President Dmitry Medvedev said Sunday’s election was “fair, honest and democratic”, but European monitors said the field was slanted in favour of United Russia and the vote was marred by apparent manipulations.
The United States has “serious concerns” about the conduct of the election, a White House spokesman said.
The observers said there had been “serious indications of ballot box stuffing” in a harsh verdict on the election that suggested United Russia could have suffered an even bigger decline in support if the voting had been completely fair.
Communist campaign chief in Tula, Valentina Mishina, said ballot stuffing was widespread in the province.
“When boxes were opened there were packs of 50, 60 ballots folded in half and bundled up, all clearly filled out by the same hand,” Mishina said.
Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov, whose party came second with nearly 20 percent of the vote, said it was the dirtiest election since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 even though United Russia suffered a big decline in support. He called it “theft on an especially grand scale”.
European observers said the vote “was characterised by frequent procedural violations and instances of apparent manipulation, including several serious indications of ballot box stuffing”.
They said the field was slanted in United Russia’s favour and the campaign was marked by “limited political competition and a lack of fairness.”
Tiny Kox, head of the delegation of monitors from the Council of Europe parliamentary assembly, said numerous ballots were found folded together in a sign of ballot stuffing at about 10 percent of the polling stations his team monitored.
The communists said they had won more votes than the result recorded for them and threatened legal action.
Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s nationalist LDPR party also cried foul, saying its monitors were thrown out of polling stations in the oil-producing region of Bashkortostan and in the Black Sea Krasnodar region.
A spokesman, who declined to be named, said election commission members in the Siberian Chelyabinsk province had been openly campaigning for United Russia inside the polling station.
Political analysts say the centralisation of power under Putin during his eight-year presidency until 2008 encourages abuses because many regions compete to secure the highest vote for United Russia — a show of loyalty they hope will be rewarded by a bigger share of state handouts.
