DTN News - RUSSIA NEWS: Russian Election Results Will Be Shock For Vladimir Putin
(NSI News Source Info) TORONTO, Canada - December 5, 2011: So when he awoke on Monday morning and saw that support for his United Russia party appeared to have fallen to just under fifty per cent from a stellar 64 per cent of the vote four years ago it must have left a bitter taste in his mouth.
In a de facto one party state where the ruling elite controls all the levers of power embarrassing setbacks like this are not supposed to happen.
Nor, it appears, did Mr Putin's party even win all of its votes fairly. The country's only independent election watchdog uncovered thousands of breaches of electoral law and was itself targeted by the authorities to make its life more difficult.
Mr Putin's Soviet-style party easily won Sunday's parliamentary election anyway. Its closest rival, the Communists, look to have garnered around only twenty per cent of the vote. But the precipitous drop in United Russia's popularity ahead of Mr Putin's own planned return to the Russian presidency next May will have the Kremlin worried.
Sunday's vote was the first chance ordinary Russians had been given to pronounce on his decision to return to the Kremlin next year for a third time. It was hardly the ringing endorsement he had hoped for.
One reason for that is indisputably that some Russian voters are beginning to grow tired of the Putin show and to resent the fact that they are not being offered any alternative.
The former KGB spy's personal popularity ratings are still above fifty per cent but they have been gradually falling.
The manner in which he and the Kremlin have stage-managed political life in the last year has not helped.
Many Russians felt that Mr Putin, who was president from 2000 to 2008, was the right 'muzhik' or real man to "put Russia back on its knees" after the anarchic 1990s.
He was credited with saving the motherland from chaos, restoring order, and then presiding over an unprecedented oil-fuelled decade-long rise in living standards.
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