YESTERDAY'S parliamentary poll in Russia was always going to be more a referendum on Vladimir Putin and the ruling United Russia party than a real election. The genuine opposition was barred from taking part long before polling day; television, which remains the main source of news and views for most of the country, has been working at full propaganda throttle; and governors and mayors across Russia were given specific targets for United Russia's voting figures and told to meet them.
Yet United Russia won just under 50% of the vote, down from 64% in 2007. It will enjoy a simple majority in parliament but no longer the two-thirds it needs to alter the constitution. Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s president, who was placed at the top of United Russia’s electoral list, tried to put a brave face on the result. Boris Gryzlov, the speaker of parliament and United Russia's chairman, argued that the party put in a strong performance compared with other European ruling parties.
That smacked of desperation, given that Russia’s voting procedure bears little resemblance to genuine elections. Most analysts say that the real lesson of yesterday's poll is that Mr Putin's regime is starting to lose legitimacy among its core voters, particularly in large cities.
This explains the Kremlin’s hysterical behaviour towards election monitors. The most important of these, Golos (Voice, or Vote), was harassed and smeared by one of Russia's main television channels after Mr Putin likened its observers, who receive foreign grants, to Judas. What irritated the authorities most, however, was an interactive map created by Golos that allowed people across Russia to report election abuses. On Saturday this earned Golos a $1,000 fine from a Moscow court.
Yesterday various websites, including Golos's and that of LiveJournal, a popular social network, were brought down by massive cyber-attacks. Some were brought back online after polling closed; others remain down. But the authorities could do little to stop videos of ballot-box stuffing being posted on YouTube and Facebook.
The irony is that United Russia could probably have won 45% of the vote anyway (although not in Moscow and St Petersburg). Opinion pollsters say that across the country this kind of rigging rarely changes the outcome by much more than 5%.
The damage to the Kremlin's legitimacy is considerably higher, particularly in Moscow, traditionally a weak spot for United Russia, and where the regime seemed to concentrate most of its efforts yesterday. Throughout the day young people in identical white coats were ferried between polling stations—some voting more than a dozen times, according to Russian journalists. I saw several organised groups casting ballots in different polling stations with distant voting permits.
Despite this, in Moscow at 6pm—two hours before voting closed—United Russia had polled only 27.5%, according to pro-Kremlin pollsters. Its final result, announced after a long delay, was 46.5%. Nowhere else in Russia was the discrepancy between exit polls and the result as high.
In St Petersburg, Mr Putin’s home town, United Russia got only 34% of the vote. This despite election-day behaviour that Sergei Mironov, leader of the Just Russia party, denounced as "lawlessness".
The Kremlin initially set up Just Russia as a clone of United Russia, but then dumped it publicly. Partly as a result the party performed strongly yesterday, winning 24.5% of the vote. This was almost double its achievement in 2007, when it was seen as a leg of the Kremlin. Yet even before the counting was complete Mr Mironov said he “did not rule out” a coalition with United Russia.
The absurdity of the rigging became clear as results came in. In some regions the sum of votes cast for all parties exceeded 140%. In Chechnya, ruled by Ramzan Kadyrov, a Kremlin-friendly strongman, United Russia’s result was 99.5%. A similar result was achieved in a Moscow psychiatric hospital.
The ballot is likely to strengthen the image of United Russia as a party of "thieves and crooks", as it is known to many Russians. But it could also fan anti-Caucasus sentiment, to potentially explosive effect. In a blog post Alexei Navalny, a popular Russian blogger with a strong nationalist tint, said that yesterday's election showed that "Putin is the president of Chechnya, Ingushetia and Dagestan—but not Russia".
Why did United Russia perform so dismally? As Alexander Oslon, a pollster who advises the Kremlin, says, it is partly the result of the job swap announced in September between Mr Medvedev and Mr Putin, who will return to the presidency next March. “If a captain of your football team says there is someone stronger than him, your confidence in the team weakens,” he said.
But many political observers say this is just a symptom of the regime's loss of legitimacy. “They cannot allow genuine competition because they are scared of losing power,” comments Dmitry Oreshkin, a political analyst. The next step could be purges within United Russia; Mr Gryzlov could be the first to go, according to Ekho Moskvy, a radio station.
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