ANALYSIS: Voters' patience with Russia's rulers thinning, experts say

By Stefan Korshak Dec 5, 2011, 12:58 GMT

Moscow - Russian voters signaled their thinning patience with the ruling United Russia party in a Sunday parliamentary vote, but Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is almost certain to be elected president in March, political observers said on Monday.

Almost-complete ballot counts showed United Russia winning a smidgen short of 50 per cent - enough to retain control over the national legislature, the Duma, but well below the 64.3 per cent in popularity it gained in the previous election five years ago.

United Russia officials, led by President Dmitry Medvedev, were quick to declare the Sunday election a vindication of the party's platform of strong central government and patriotism.

But political analysts contradicted that view, saying voters had served Russia's rulers notice.

'Patience with United Russia is thinning. People are tired of being taken for granted by the rulers,' said Nikolai Petrov, a political analyst for the Carnegie Endowment of International Peace.

'They must start producing results that average people can see and feel,' Petrov said. 'Otherwise, to get elected president, Putin may have to resort to methods that will undermine the authorities' legitimacy even more.'

Echoes from the Soviet era on voting day were plentiful.

Independent web sites counted thousands of violations of voter law, before hacker attacks shut them down. Factory bosses ordered staff into work, on a weekend, to vote en masse. In some cases workers were told their employers needed a United Russia victory to stay in business.

In some Caucasus provinces, official turn-out counts approached 100 per cent - a number difficult to credit given the region's rugged terrain, poor roads, foul winter weather and an long-running Muslim insurgency against some 130,000 Russian soldiers deployed there.

'These elections in our view were not free and fair. A huge number of people were pressured. These are typical violations which we saw many many years ago (in the Soviet era) and now they have returned,' said Grigory Melkonyants, a Moscow-based political scientist who works for the election monitoring group Golos.

In urban and middle-class Moscow, turn-out was the worst in years. Graffiti seen by a dpa reporter at Moscow's popular VDNKh exposition centre, site of a Medvedev youth supporter convention, said: 'Enough of them already!'

Political observers said that United Russia's failure to gain more than 50 per cent of the vote - even with the open support of provincial officials and state-run media - was proof that Russians no longer were buying the Medvedev-Putin line that Russia is marching forward to greatness.

'This was not a protest against Medvedev, and not a protest against Putin. It was a protest of just being tired with the system. Of a cruel system with a single leader, and without any place for discussion,' said Aleksei Vernediktov, managing editor of the opposition Ekho Moskvy radio station.

Direct criticism of Putin and Medvedev is, with very few exceptions, taboo in Russia's national media; but saying what is wrong with the country is not.

Many average Russian grievances would be familiar to a European politician: families cannot afford homes, only rich children get good education, government seems to support big corporations too much and it is not clear why so much money gets spent on weapons and so little on pensions.

Political observers say United Russia's longstanding proposed solutions to those problems - massive development of the country's infrastructure, especially in the Arctic and Siberia, and sacrifice by the general population - are losing their appeal to Russia's generally patriotic voters.

But analysts without exception agree that, no matter what Russians may think of Putin, when the country goes back to the polls in March, he will win a third stint as president.

'They (United Russia) will do what it takes. They hope he (Putin) will retain his popularity, but if not they will do what it takes to get the result they need,' Petrov said.

Varvara Nikolevna, a shopkeeper in Moscow's working-class Park Pobedy district, echoed a similar opinion: 'Everything is decided for us.'