Putin's party accused of dirty tricks in run-up to poll

By Wolfgang Jung Nov 27, 2011, 2:06 GMT

Moscow - Days ahead of Russia's parliamentary elections, human rights activists and the opposition are accusing Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's United Russia party of resorting to dirty tricks.

The party leaders apparently fear a bad showing, with polls indicating a decline in support for United Russia.

In the run-up to parliamentary elections on December 4, reports about breaches of election law have been mounting.

The alleged violations range from pressure being put on pensioners and propaganda in schools, to gifts for government supporters. Human rights activists slam such practices as unfair and illegal.

The most recent victim was a satirical comic strip which portrayed Putin as a crazy old man - the electoral commission promptly banned it.

'Although Putin's United Russia is regarded as certain to win the elections, the prime minister's aides are leaving nothing to chance,' the Kremlin-critical Novaya Gazeta newspaper commented recently.

'Our phone lines have been busy for weeks with calls from angry protesters,' said a spokeswoman for the independent election monitoring organization Golos.

Callers say that soldiers in barracks, citizens in elderly people's homes or factory workers are being drilled to vote for United Russia, the spokeswoman said.

Amateur videos on the internet show Putin party officials telling mayors that road construction is dependent on a high number of votes.

In another incident, patients in a Siberian hospital were threatened with the immediate cancellation of their treatment if they voted 'incorrectly,' the Golos spokeswoman said.

United Russia has rejected the criticism, with the secretary of the party's General Council presidium, Sergei Neverov, blaming Western media for the negative press.

The accusations were 'politically motivated and unproven,' he said.

However, former Soviet president and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Mikhail Gorbachev has also criticized the election campaign in his homeland.

Speaking in Berlin recently, the 80-year-old former leader said authorities had been told to secure a majority for Putin's party, and that companies had been forced to donate substantial sums of money.

'It's quite embarrassing,' Gorbachev said.

In the 20 years since the demise of the Soviet Union, the gulf separating those in power from the people has seldom been as wide as during the current election campaign, according to Moscow-based political scientist Boris Makarenko.

The country's political leaders allegedly fear falling significantly behind the two-thirds majority reached in the 2007 elections.

Asked about the official election target, President Dmitry Medvedev remained vague. 'We want to stay in the leading role,' he said.

Russia's independent polling organization, the Levada Centre, says support for the leading duo of Putin and Medvedev has plunged from 60 to 51 per cent in recent weeks.

'Many Russians feel cheated by the fact that the 'power tandem' has agreed to an audacious switch of office,' said Alexei Grazhdankin, the deputy head of the Levada Centre, referring to Putin's plans to resume the presidency for a third term.

Attempts are now underway to woo the one-third of the electorate who are still undecided - and no punches are being pulled in the fight.

In Moscow, accusations that Putin's party was cheating were based on the fact that their election posters were similar to official ones encouraging people to use their right to vote.

In Krasnoyarsk, Siberia, the director of a secondary school recently threatened to expel a student who had daubed the words 'party of crooks and thieves' across posters of Putin and Medvedev.

A video of the telling-off sparked an uproar on the internet, prompting the Education Ministry to quickly concede that the posters should never have been put up in the school in the first place.