November 26:
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has suggested that Russian laws regulating political parties might be loosened in the future. Medvedev, however, does not believe there should be “too many parties in the country,”Interfax reports, because “this splits the people’s perception about who should represent their interests.” And although the president has admitted that qualification criteria for political parties were made severe, he justified it by depicting restrictions on political actors to be a safeguard. “[I]t is impossible to create a party and say: ‘Well this is the second ruling party, and you, the people of Russia, are obliged to vote for it,’” says Medvedev.
November 28:
A week after Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin was booed at a mixed martial arts match, and only a week ahead of the parliamentary elections expected to cost United Russia its constitutional majority, the party held a highly publicized rally to kick off Putin’s presidential campaign. Characterized as a “Putin lovefest” by theMoscow Times, the event witnessed a Soviet-style vote in which 614 of 614 secret ballots were cast in favor of Putin as the party’s next presidential candidate.
November 29:
Another recent poll has suggested a downward trend in Russia’s level of protest potential ahead of parliamentary elections. According to Interfax, only about 23 percent of all Russians polled by VTsIOM (the All-Russia Center for the Study of Public Opinion) consider a “mass demonstration” to be likely. Supporters of the Communist Party were among the most likely to believe a protest possible, while supporters of United Russia, unsurprisingly, were among the least likely. More telling, however, was the drop in those personally willing to join a demonstration, which fell from 27 to 22 percent.
[Editors’ Note: Given the effect of Russia’s increasingly authoritarian political climate on pollsters and respondents alike, the results of public opinion surveys in Russia should be viewed with some caution.]
November 30:
Russia’s only local election monitor, Golos, has come under attack only days before elections. According to the Washington Post, Prime Minister Putin used his party’s recent rally to deride the organization, and used thinly veiled allusions to the group to accuse it of taking money from the West in return for influencing the elections. Golos’ deputy director retaliated, and insisted that Putin’s remarks were part of a “national campaign aimed at closing down Golos.” Only 200 monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe were permitted to observe the 95,000 polling stations across Russia. Golos, which maintains an online map that reports campaign and voting violations, is the only independent monitor based inside the country.
December 1:
The Kremlin’s assault on Golos has escalated. Days after Prime Minister Putin sharply criticized the monitoring organization at a party rally, the New York Times reports that lawmakers from three political parties have appealed to the country's federal prosecutor to launch an investigation into the group. The lawmakers insist that the online map maintained by the organization - which tracks voting violations across the country - violates a Russian law against publishing polling results during the five days before an election. Their letter to the federal prosecutor also claimed that Golos disseminated rumors “under the guise of trustworthy reports, with the goal of defaming a party as well as its individual members." Aside from discrediting the organization, the charges could lead to fines of up to $3,200.
December 2:
After it first insisted that any Syrian-related intervention by the international community should be handled by the UN Security Council, Russia now has blocked a move to refer human rights violations by the Assad regime to the body, BusinessWeek reports. Joined in by China, Cuba, and Ecuador, Russia’s ambassador to the UN justified the stance by saying that it “wasn’t the function of the 15-nation Security Council... to pursue confrontation.” Turkey has already imposed its own sanctions on the Assad regime, as did the United States, the European Union, and the Arab League, which suspended Syria’s membership in November.
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