Acting Mayor Anatoly Pakhomov won the election handily, but Pakhomov is a member of Vladimir Putin’s United Russia Party, and that’s where the controversy begins. Former Deputy Prime Minister, and Sochi mayoral candidate Boris Nemtsov cried foul - saying not only had the Kremlin directed a smear campaign against him in the run-up to the election, but that the government was guilty of widespread vote-rigging. Billionaire Alexander Lebedev, the only other “serious” candidate, was disqualified weeks before the election, another indication, critics say, that the vote was fixed.
Not only does the spectre of Vladimir Putin hang over the Sochi race, so to does the 2014 Winter Olympics – Putin’s pet project - that are to be held in the city. The Olympics, while touted as an engine of economic development for the whole Sochi region, has its fair share of critics, who say that the region can’t handle an event the size of the Olympics. Nemtsov himself suggested spreading the Games around to a number of Russian cities.
Nemtsov claims that the Olympics were part of the reason Putin felt the Sochi race had to be rigged - to ensure that one of ‘his own’ was in charge of the city in time for the Games. Opposition candidates say that they were regularly harassed, that government officials blocked rallies and denied them access to radio and television stations; meanwhile Sochi’s main TV station aired a 20-minute program that among other things accused Nemtsov of being a South Korean spy (a wide-spread rumor was that if elected mayor Nemtsov would endorse the idea of moving the Winter Games to South Korea, the runner-up in the IOC vote that awarded the Games to Sochi).
Golos, an independent Russian election-monitoring group claimed that 25% of all votes cast were early ballots (votes cast before election day). This, critics say, is a tactic the government uses to ensure that people - like government workers and students vote the “right” way, since the ballots can be checked by a third party (like a worker’s supervisor) before being cast. Other sources put the early vote totals at 11%.
Pakhomov though won more than 76% of the vote, with Nemtsov finishing a very distant second with just 13.6%. For the sake of argument, let’s assume the worst about Putin, the Russian government and vote-rigging. Let’s even subtract all of the early voting using Golos’ 25% figure; Pakhomov still would have easily won the election.
That’s what makes the Kremlin’s apparent interference in Russian elections so stupid. Vote rigging makes sense if you are worried you're going to lose, but if you're going to win? And I don't think its a stretch to think that the odds were in favor of Pakhomov, the incumbent mayor and member of the (still) popular United Russia Party over Nemtsov, who is a co-founder of the Union of Right Forces (SPS in Russian), one of the liberal parties that many Russians still blame for the economic chaos of the 1990s. Even in last year’s presidential election (again, filled with allegations of vote-rigging), was it realistic to think that Dmitry Medvedev would have lost to the candidates put up by the Communists (whose support languishes around 10%, mostly among older voters), or the nationalistic (and perhaps ironically-named) Liberal Democrats (who also hang around the 10% mark) or the SPS or Yabloko, the two liberal factions relegated to near-irrelevance nationally because of their linkages to the bad old days of the 90s and internal divisions?
Maybe it’s just a lingering Soviet mentality then among Putin and his inner circle - that elections are fine so long as you know the outcome in advance. But perhaps there are signs of change. Last week Anton Chumachenko, a United Russia member, newly-elected to a legislative council seat in St. Petersburg, renounced his own victory because of what he said were votes falsified in his favor. On the surface the 23-year old Chumachenko looks like one of what are sometimes called the ‘Putin Youth’, he was a member of the pro-Kremlin Youth Guard turned political activist. But in an open letter to his constituents, Chumachenko wrote: “I don't need this kind of victory! I don't want to begin my political career with a cynical mockery of rights, laws and morality.”
Maybe it’s a small sign of a maturing democracy in Russia.
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