Prokhorov, who with $18 billion to his name is Russia’s third richest man, plans to run as an independent candidate with no party backing and Yavlinsky plans to run as a candidate of the liberal Yabloko party. Both made announcements via their Facebook pages and both plan to submit the signatures they have collected to the Central Election Commission for inspection.

Complex approval process

Mikhail Prokhorov's Facebook announcement

To make the task even more difficult only a maximum of 50,000 signatures can come from a single Russian region, which means that 50,000 people must be found in each of at least 40 Russian regions.

Approval is by no means guaranteed, and the CEC has been accused in the past of using the difficult registration process as a way to block opposition parties from taking part in elections. Mikhail Kasyanov was denied entry into the last Presidential election because some of his signatures were deemed invalid and, as recently as last summer, the People’s Freedom Party was blocked from registering as an official political party for failing to collect enough valid signatures.

Both candidates are confident that their applications will be approved, though, and that they will be on the ballot come March. Given the increased scrutiny of this election, refusal to grant approval would be a PR disaster for the Russian Government.

Additionally, it’s looking increasingly likely that Putin will fail to reach the 50% threshold needed to win the election outright in the first round. The more candidates there are in an election, the better the excuse Putin’s team has for not securing a first round victory so, unless there are some blatant violations of electoral law, I think it’s unlikely that the CEC will take the risk of refusing to register either Prokhorov or Yavlinsky.

Campaigning begins in earnest

Putin's 2012 Presidential election campaign website

Vladimir Putin unveiled his manifesto on his putin2012.ru website earlier today. He seems to be playing the ‘steady hand in a storm’ card, playing on his previous successes and observing that while calls for revolution can be attractive, especially in Russia, they rarely have a positive outcome:

“A recurring problem in Russian history is the desire of a part of its elites to make leaps, to embrace revolution instead of sequential development. Not only Russian experience, but all world experience shows the fatal result of historic leaps: haste and subversion , without creation.”

Off less interest to the foreign observer, perhaps, Putin also promised that, if he is elected, he will improve education in Russia, create millions of new high tech jobs and eradicate poverty in Russia within a decade.

Mikhail Prokhorov, meanwhile, has turned his attention to negative campaigning. In an article for Russian newspaper RBK Daily, he accused the other Russian opposition parties of selling out Russian voters in their haste to accomodate Putin and United Russia. He added that they had “decided to ride the wave of public discontent and convert it for their gain, both politically and commercially.”

The Communist Party hit back with a well aimed below the belt jab of their own, suggesting that Prokhorov might want to explain just how he managed to acquire a personal wealth of $18 billion.

Finally, Vladimir Zhirinosky, the ever-youthful leader of the nationalist Liberal Democrats unveiled his upbeat campaign slogan today. “It’s Zhirinovsky or it will be worse”.

Prokhorov and Yavlinsky collect 2 million signatures needed to run for Russian President is a post from: Siberian Light

Numbers are difficult to judge, but it appears that around 5-6,000 people protested earlier in the day, breaking off into a smaller group of around 1,000 that then went on to Triumfalnaya Square. It was there that most of the trouble took place, and according to RIA Novosti, more than 250 people were arrested, including Sergei Mitrokhin, Yabloko’s deputy chairman and former Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov.

“I am outraged at the lawlessness that we saw on 4 December, with the false elections, and on 5 December,” Mitrokhin told reporters. “I am ready to call for the entire government, headed by Putin, to resign.”

Navalny tweeted this picture, saying "With my lads on the police bus. They all say hi,"

Protests were also held in St Petersburg which attracted around 1,000 people, 150 of whom were arrested, and smaller protests were held in a number of other cities across the country.

The protests prompted counter-protests from pro-Kremlin activists, many from Nashi.

The protests, and criticisms of fraud throughout the election, have prompted some response from the Kremlin, albeit a pretty limited one. President Dmitry Medvedev has announced that there will be an investigation of accusations of electoral fraud claims, although he seemed fairly dismissive of most of the claims and took pains to stress that this was something that should be done after every election as a matter of procedure. Putin hasn’t directly commented on the protests, although he doesn’t seem surprised about protests and criticism if this Moscow Times report is anything to go by:

Corruption and embezzlement “are not a cliche for the ruling party, they are a cliche for the authorities” in general, Putin said.

“Think back to Soviet times and the people who were in power back then. All of them were also called thieves and bribe-takers,” Putin said, in a clear nod to United Russia’s reputation as the “party of crooks and thieves,” Interfax reported.

(An interesting choice, by the way, to compare United Russia’s Government to the Soviet Government. It’ll play well with those in the domestic audience who crave stability and familiarity, but it’ll wind up amny protestors and the foreign audience no end.)

Speaking of the foreign audience, there has been a quite excitable reaction from the international press, many of whom seem to be breathlessly hoping for a Russian Arab Spring (no longer do they refer to a colored revolution…) and choosing to focus on the crackdown and the sending of troops in to secure Moscow. My favourite headline was this, from the never knowingly under-stated Fox News: Carnage Breaks Out at Moscow Protests as Youths Square Off.

For all the hype, it’s almost possible to imagine that this week’s protests will build any real momentum. No matter how much breathless reporting we see, the protestors number no more than a few thousand in a city of millions.

However, the protests may have a longer term impact in raising the profile of election fraud among the wider population and in exposing some small cracks in the Kremlin’s resolve ahead of next year’s Russian Presidential election, which has the potential to be a much closer affair. You can imagine that there would be considerable anger if Putin were to pick up 51-52% of the vote in a first round ballot that sees the same obvious manipulation of ballots that we’ve seen this election in Chechnya and other similarly sycophantic regions.

The Communist Party’s candidate Gennady Zyuganov is most likely to finish second in the Presidential election. He and his supporters will have good reason to be very upset if he is denied a run-off due to electoral fraud. If Zyuganov has any sense, he’ll be closely studying these Moscow protests and thinking about how much impact they could have if they were backed by the full weight of the Russian Communist Party.

Then maybe the press will have something to get breathless (and even more confused than normal) over.

Moscow Protests: For now or the future? is a post from: Siberian Light

As expected the Communist Party are second with 19.13% of the vote, which gives them almost twice as many votes as they received in the 2007 Duma elections.

The big surprise of the night, however, has been the performance of A Just Russia – with 13.18% they’ve sneaked ahead of the Liberal Democratic Party (11.66%) to become the third largest party in Russia. Polls have shown them with around 7% support over the past few months, so to get more than 13% is an impressive achievement.

No other parties secured the 7% of votes needed to secure proportionate representation in the Duma. Yabloko received 3.25% of the vote, just enough to secure free air-time at the next election, Patriots of Russia 0.96% and Right Cause 0.50%.

Infographic from RIA Novosti.

Reaction and the future for Putin and United Russia

The result will come as a real disappointment for United Russia, which has been luxuriating in a constitutional supermajority of more than 66% in the current Duma, and is a massive drop in support from the 64.3% of the vote it enjoyed in 2007. At one point, when it looked as though United Russia might not secure a majority in the Duma, there was talk of United Russia entering into coalition agreements with other parties. At a United Russia conference, President Dmitry Medvedev told delegates that:

“Given the more complex configuration of the State Duma, we will have to enter coalition agreements on separate issues. This is normal, this is parliamentarianism, this is democracy.”

It looks as though United Russia will have just about enough seats not to have to rely on coalitions, although its lead will be sufficiently fragile that it will need to worry about defections from the party reducing and potentially even eliminating its majority over the course of the next four years.

Vladimir Putin’s reaction has been rather muted. He is quoted in RIA Novosti as saying that the results “really reflect the situation in the country” and that they “allow for the steady development of Russia.” Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail described him as looking “angry” as he criticised United Russia’s performance, saying that his party “has to bear some responsibility for the failures, as well as the successes for the past few years.”

Putin, of course, will have an eye on next year’s Presidential election because, if today’s result were replicated there, he would be forced into a second round ballot against Gennady Zyuganov, the Communist Party candidate. Given the widespread reduction in support for United Russia – which many believe is linked to Putin’s decision to stand again for the Presidency – this is not an unlikely scenario.

It will be interesting to see how the global press interprets the election in the wake of today’s results – I expect a mixture of stories proclaiming that this is the beginning of the end of the Putin era and stories explaining how democracy will now be stifled in Russia a Putin worried that democracy might cost him his job.

A fair reflection of public opinion, or a rigged election?

Today’s Duma election result shouldn’t be seen as a complete surprise. Over the past year, opinion polls have been reporting a steady drop in support for United Russia, and polls conducted just before the election showed United Russia having only around 55% support. To drop to around 50% in the actual election demonstrates only a 10% difference between the polls and the results, which is not something that would shame pollsters anywhere in the world.

From the perspective of the health of Russian democracy as a whole, the result seems fairly encouraging, and may well silence some critics who say that Russian democracy is entirely managed. That a regime that supposedly controls the ballot box secured less than 50% of the vote in a result that more or less mirrored the predictions of pollsters is quite difficult to imagine.

Early indications from international observers – including some from the OSCE and the European Parliament – is that they believe the polls were conducted freely and fairly. However, the election has not passed without controversy and reports of violations.

Independent (and US/European funded) election observers Golos reported more than 5,000 violations on a day in which their head was arrested briefly at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport; a number of big-name independent (read: critical of United Russia) websites, including Livejournal, Echo Moscow and Kommersant, were shut down entirely by hackers using Denial of Service attacks; a number of journalists, including a BBC cameraman were briefly detained, and hundreds of demonstrators were arrested in Moscow and St Petersburg for attempting to hold unsanctioned rallies (all have since been released).

And as is now traditional in Chechnya, the voters voted almost unanimously for the ruling party. The result there was 99.47% in favour of United Russia (pic via Twitter courtesy of Nils van der Vegte).

United Russia secures 99.47% of the vote in Chechnya

Russia’s leading liberal party, Yabloko, have announced that they intend to contest the results of the election. Their Chairman Sergei Mitrokhin told reporters that:

“Despite gross violations throughout the country, despite ballot stuffing, falsifications, we see that on the whole, Yabloko’s results are rather positive.”

Yabloko will be particularly upset by the results released from polling stations abroad, where they are the most popular party. In the United Kingdom, where more than 2,000 voted, Yabloko secured 41% of the votes, well ahead of the second placed Communists (19.7%) and ahead of United Russia whose 10.6% was only enough to secure fourth place. Similar results were seen among Russian ballots held elsewhere in Europe – in France, for example, Yabloko won again with 31.5%.

Russian Duma Election 2011: United Russia support slumps below 50% is a post from: Siberian Light

Finacial meltdown

Yabloko garnered just 1.59% of the popular vote in December’s Duma elections and the Union of Right Forces (SPS) received a mere 0.94%, which effectively renders both parties as non-entities on the national political scene. Not only did they both fail to gain the 7% of votes needed to secure a place in the Duma, they failed to even reach the 3% required to qualify for free airtime in the run-up to the election. As a result, they’ll have to pay for the airtime they used – approximately $8 million apiece.

As a result, both parties are heavily in debt. No-one in Yabloko HQ will reveal the exact figures, but senior Yabloko member Alexei Melnikov has indicated that the party’s debt currently stands at 5 times its current annual budget of $1.8 million. SPS meanwhile are reported to be more than $8 million in debt.

Of the two, perhaps SPS is in the stronger position to come out fighting – their links to Russian business will be a great help when it comes to fund-raising – but the future looks bleak for both parties, and I wonder how they can possibly survive another electoral beating of this magnitude.

Internal party politics

Both parties are clearly agonising over their defeats, but it is far from clear that anything much will actually change.

Nikita Belykh had the good grace to resign as leader of the Union of Right Forces (SPS). He cited the party’s poor performance at the polls – SPS gained just 0.94% of the vote – and his own strategic blunder of not taking a tough stance against the Kremlin until it was too late.

Unfortunately, perhaps, for the concept of personal accountability, he was re-elected at the SPS Party Congress yesterday.

The Party Congress also decided to nominate the party’s co-founder Boris Nemtsov as their candidate for the upcoming Presidential election, demonstrating pretty conclusively that not much is actually going to change at the top for the next few months at least.

At Yabloko, meanwhile, things look more interesting – even if not particularly sensible. Rumours are circulating that Grigory Yavlinsky their long-time leader, may be facing a challenge.

Underlining this was the party’s decision to back Vladimir Bukovsky as their Presidential candidate. Although perhaps positive in that it shows some diversity, I can’t help but think that a party that chooses a man who lives in London as its Presidential candidate is on the fast track to political self destruction.

Unification – the only option left?

There has been plenty of talk in the past few years about a merger between Yabloko and SPS, to shore up their decaying futures. But, for the most part, such talk has been of the hopeful pie in the sky variety.

There are some proud personalities involved in Russia’s liberal politics, and everyone fears that they would lose their own identity in a merger. Even today, Boris Nemtsov of SPS is completely opposed to the idea of a merger with Yabloko:

“Unification on the basis of Yabloko is no unification at all,” Nemtsov said, dismissing the prospect of joining up with the party as “complete nonsense.”

If he, and Yabloko, want to carry on along their current path, well, that’s fine I suppose. But they should walk in the full knowledge that the path they are on heads straight to the nearest cemetery.

If Russia’s liberals want to have an impact on national politics, they absolutely have to muster enough votes to get into the Duma. Neither SPS nor Yabloko, as has been demonstrated clearly this December, have a cat in hell’s chance of doing it alone.

Leonty Byzov, head of the analytical section of state polling agency VTsIOM, along with other analysts, estimates that around 10-12% of Russia’s voters are ‘liberal,’ so there’s a pretty sizeable chunk of the electorate out there up for grabs – certainly enough to get a liberal party into the Duma.

If Yabloko and SPS, and the other smaller liberal parties can’t find it within themselves to gather up their courage and merge into one united liberal party, they will never pull in enough votes to cover their operating costs, let alone become nationally significant.

For Yabloko or SPS, it really is time to unify or die.

Unify or die – the stark choice facing Russia’s liberals is a post from: Siberian Light