Russia votes for powerless parliament

Spectrezine’s old friend Senator Tiny Kox of the Dutch Socialist Party will head the Council of Europe’s team of election observers overseeing Russia’s parliamentary elections next Sunday, 4th December. Senator Kox will head a team of forty MPs from different Council of Europe member states, each of whom is also a member of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE).  He has already met with all of the parties taking part, several which have fallen foul of the election criteria, and a number of NGOs involved in one way or another with the elections, including human rights groups.
To win any seats, a party must in the last election receive at least 7% of the votes, but on this occasion parties receiving between 5% and 7% will receive a single seat in the new Duma.
Kox will present his report to PACE at its plenary in Strasbourg next January. For now, he must keep an open mind and, to a large extent, a closed mouth, constrained as he is by the need to be impartial and to avoid taking a prejudiced view.  As he says, “Observers use both their ears and their eyes – and also their mouths, to ask questions. But an assessment is only possible once the polling stations are closed. Then we have to listen closely, and keeping your mouth shut becomes both an art and a duty, because elections remain a matter for the citizens of a country and their politicians. Together they determine how the election process unfolds and how it might be improved in the future. Democracy comes from within, not from outside.”
The Economist , unconstrained by such considerations, speaks of biased media and United Russia, supporter of Vladimir Putin and the front-runner in the polls, being given all kinds of privileges by the state.  It describes this, however, as “pretty tame election-fiddling by the standards of some countries”, adding that “United Russia does not need much fiddling. Mr Putin has delivered economic growth and stability. The arrest, in October, of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Russia's richest man, has been popular, as the get-rich-quick ‘oligarchs’ are among Russia's most hated men. The party's media image is so good that, even though it refused to take part in televised debates with other parties, opinion polls later showed that people judged it to have been the best performer in them.”
Boris Kagarlitsky, director of Moscow’s Institute of Globalization Studies, offers in a recent Moscow Times article  a rather different explanation for United Russia’s success. The Duma has no more power than had its predecessor, the Supreme Soviet.  Consequently, many opponents of the government don’t bother to vote, and even advocate abstention as a strategy, as a low turn-out makes it harder for the Kremlin to claim that the elections were legitimate, while “fewer ballots in the boxes mean that elections officials will have to work that much harder to manipulate the results.”
Kagarlitsky compares the election to Egyptian elections under Mubarak. Boycotts meant that the dictator’s supporters held 90% of seats, but discredited the process by which they were elected. He criticises the Communist Party, the Duma’s second biggest ‘force’, arguing that “by participating in the elections, the Communists give the Kremlin what it wants — the impression that there is at least some pluralism in the Duma.”
Fortunately Europe’s peoples could have no better eyes and ears leading our observers than thos of Tiny Kox. We await his report with interest.