Russia’s flawed election and the humbling of a star

Parliamentary elections last Sunday yielded an embarrassing drop in support for the ruling United Russia party. Worse,the Kremlin was caught red-handed perpetrating a massive election fraud. Despite its best efforts the party emerged 77 seats down from the last election four years ago.

But hundreds of bloggers,independent monitors and ordinary citizens with camera phones recorded an avalanche of violations,from stuffing ballot boxes to buying absentee voting papers to falsifying results.

“I don’t think the level of falsification was greater than 2007. It was simply far more obvious,” says Andrei Buzin,head of monitoring for Golos,an independent election observer that has faced much official pressure in the last week,including a court- imposed fine. “Suddenly everyone had a camera phone and access to the internet. It put the fraud right in front of people’s faces.”

The attacks on blogs and social networks did not stop word from getting out. By Monday,Muscovites were furious and a march in downtown Moscow was met by riot police,who beat protesters and arrested 300,including opposition leaders Ilya Yashin and Alexei Navalny. Tuesday and Wednesday brought more of the same.

The next few weeks will show whether a fractious opposition can unify around a single figure,the way democrats in the early 1990s rallied round Boris Yeltsin. The strongest candidate seems currently to be Navalny,a tall and charismatic blogger of pronounced nationalist views who made his reputation in exposing corruption. His arrest could prove to be a strategic mistake by the authorities. “They’ve made him instantly from an online leader to an offline one as well,” says Alexei Venediktov,editor of Echo Moskvy radio station.

But it is unclear whether the opposition can maintain its momentum when keyboards are swapped for Moscow’s freezing December streets. “It is one thing to press ‘like’ on your Facebook page and quite another thing to have four riot police bang your head on a parked car,” says one demonstrator who was in Triumph Square on Tuesday night.

For this reason many remain sceptical about hopes that Russia might experience its own version of the Arab spring,despite the similarities to the authoritarian regimes in north Africa that have crumbled: a younger generation with no social mobility,widespread internet and a lot of 30-somethings with camera phones.

But while the regime seems safe for now,it is nonetheless clear that the Putin model of managed democracy is malfunctioning badly. “The top-down model of ‘political technology’,the method of managing political life in Russia,is exhausted,” says Gleb Pavlovsky,a former Kremlin spin doctor.

Fewer and fewer are watching television,the traditional method of mind control since Soviet days – it was Wednesday night before state TV reported on the demonstrations that had started last Sunday. While Putin sought on Thursday to blame the demonstrations on “signals” sent to Russia’s opposition by Hillary Clinton,US secretary of state,fewer and fewer are taking this paranoid cold war-era bluster seriously.

Many Russians appear to have tired of the 12-year rule of Putin and are especially weary at the prospect of a dozen more. Having spent four years as prime minister while Dmitry Medvedev,his former chief of staff,kept the presidential seat warm for him,Putin in September breezily announced that he intended to return – possibly for two six-year terms – while Medvedev said he would take over as prime minister.

“The Kremlin made a huge mistake back in September,” says Tanya Lokshina at Human Rights Watch,an advocacy group. “Apathetic or not,people do not like to treated like cattle.” Since the proposed job swap was unveiled,the number of Russians who describe Putin as trustworthy has fallen from 54 per cent to 46 per cent,according to the Public Opinion Foundation – not a disaster but a downward trend nonetheless.

Although the flawed elections and a tone-deaf Kremlin response were the catalyst for the protests,the real origins of Putin’s fall from grace lie in the economy,argue many analysts. During his first two terms as president,in 2000-08,real incomes more than doubled in dollar terms,as high oil prices and limited reforms combined to expand the economy and wages outpaced inflation.

But since 2009,when gross domestic product fell 8 per cent under the weight of the global financial crisis,that bargain has been breaking down. Although the Kremlin threw money at social programmes,real incomes have since remained largely flat as inflation,while slowing,ran ahead of wages.

Putin’s credibility has meanwhile been damaged by increasingly apparent cronyism that seems to have benefited his associates. While he built his popularity in the early 2000s by tackling Russia’s powerful oligarchs,now the tables are turned; many in his inner circle have made vast fortunes.

Ordinary Russians were willing to forgive corruption among the elite as long as their own lives were improving. But with living standards falling for the first time in a decade,the hypocrisy by which a well-connected few grow richer has angered many. “Deep down,you can feel the formation of an angry and resentful tide,” says Lilia Shevtsova at the Carnegie Moscow Center,a think-tank. “Now,the bubble has burst.”

A new book,Change or Decay,which Shevtsova has written jointly with Andrew Wood,former UK ambassador to Russia,cites poll data that show 40 per cent of Russians “believe that Russia needs radical change”. The last time this mood held sway,they say,was in 1991.

Yet it is too early to write Putin off. His ratings may have fallen but they remain high and the Kremlin has ensured that he is not threatened by a challenger. It has the tools and expertise to intimidate opponents – from 51,000 police and soldiers deployed in Moscow to Nashi,a Kremlin-backed youth group that employs football hooligans with aluminium bats to crush opposition. There are also tools to buy opponents off – the Reserve Fund and the Welfare Fund,two repositories of Russia’s oil revenues available to finance extra budget spending,total $110bn.

What is clear,however,is that Putin has lost the invincible tsar-like aura he once enjoyed. One particularly humiliating moment came last month when he was booed at a martial arts fight when he stepped into the ring to congratulate the winner (the YouTube video of that incident has been viewed more than 4m times).

The question now is,how will he react to his changed circumstances. Few people are counting on Putin to liberalise,but cracking down could be explosive. Vladimir Pribylovsky,an independent political scientist,says: “He is not the type to liberalise. And I don’t think he can tighten the screws either. He just wants to do nothing and hope for the best.”

Charles Clover© 2011 The Financial Times Limited