This past week, Russia’s national elections took place, an election that was originally scheduled for the December, but was moved up to the busiest part of the year for most voters. The big shocker: Putin won. United Russia now holds even more Parliament seats than before, jumping from 238 to 343, while all other parties shrunk. Voters in the larger cities, where opposition to Putin is more concentrated, didn’t show up in quite the same force as voters in rural areas, where support for the president is based on a more traditional sense.
The good news? It seems as the the Kremlin kept their word and ran a clean race. While four districts were nullified because poll workers were caught cramming ballot boxes, analysts found that the fraud was committed by the local government, not the national.
Not much change will be seen after this election, as Parliament already does whatever Putin asks. Putin was quoted to have said in the cabinet meeting “At a time of difficulties. . . and risks, people certainly choose stability and trust the country’s leading political force and government”. Only 46% of Russian voters came to the polls, Putin, maybe the other 56% would’ve put their trust in someone else.
This isn’t really news. We all know that Russia isn’t really running a democracy, but rather an underground communistic regime. It makes sense, because the things we hear from the Kremlin sound a lot like they where 20+ years ago. And if we look at the people, most of them grew up in the Soviet Union. Their whole lives they have only known communism. They are largely a people not ready for democracy, which is ok, given that your leaders help your economy to prosperity. There in lies Russia’s problem. So, Putin feign’s democracy and capitalism for Russia and then performs as he did back in the KGB. Don’t get me wrong, it works, and the country functions…poorly, but it functions. It’s just not a democracy, it’s not ready.
Elections in Russia were interesting. I really liked he article because it give us a better perspective of what happened during the elections. The elections were fair, however, United Russia came out with the win. However, as the article suggest “United Russia had received more than 54 percent, up from 49 percent in 2011.” This helps us understand that turnout changed the dynamics of the elections. Turn out could have potentially created a more competitive election in Russia. So this could be attributed to the fact that people are either satisfied with the status quo or the people in Russia already know about the outcome of the race, so why bother. This is an interesting factor to consider and to be analyzed.