The Hindu : Putin's party sweeps parliamentary poll

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, Dec 09, 2003

International

International

Putin's party sweeps parliamentary poll

By Vladimir Radyuhin

MOSCOW DEC. 8. The Russian President, Vladimir Putin's centrist party has swept the parliamentary elections held on Sunday, winning almost 37 per cent of the vote and trouncing both Communist and right-wing opponents.

With nearly 98 per cent of the votes counted, the pro-Kremlin party, United Russia, is leading with 37.09 per cent, and looks set to grab an absolute majority in the new lower House, the State Duma, with the help of allies. Half of the State Duma's 450 seats are elected on party lists and half are filled by winners in individual constituency races.

United Russia, led by Cabinet Ministers and packed with Federal and regional bureaucrats, owes its success largely to the support of the popular President, whose approval rating tops 80 per cent.

The Communist Party has suffered a big setback, winning 12.7 per cent of the votes compared to 24 per cent it garnered in the 1999 poll. Communists will get 53 seats in the State Duma, down from 117 they had in the outgoing legislature.

The ultra-nationalist, Vladimir Zhirinovsky's Liberal Democratic Party has almost doubled its 1999 result, winning 11.6 per cent. The left-wing Rodina (Motherland) bloc, founded just three months ago, sprang the biggest surprise of the election, clocking in fourth with 9.1 per cent of the vote. Both parties are likely to cooperate with United Russia in the State Duma, giving the Kremlin a two-thirds majority needed to amend the Constitution if Mr. Putin decides to run for a third term in 2008.

The vote came as a big victory for Mr. Putin. It has tightened his control over the lower House and opened the way to his easy re-election in presidential elections next March. With the Communist party in crisis, its leader, Gennady Zyuganov, the main Opposition candidate in the previous two presidential elections, will be unable to put up any serious challenge to Mr. Putin.

The two pro-Western parties, Union of Right Forces (SPS) and Yabloko, have been shut out of Parliament, failing to clear the 5-per cent hurdle to win any seats. The defeat of SPS, whose leaders carried out IMF-advised "shock-therapy" reforms under the former President, Boris Yeltsin, in particular indicates a shift in Russian society away from Western values and to the left, notwithstanding the Communist setback. This is bound to influence economic policies and the line-up of the Government, which is still dominated by liberals.

The setback to the Communist Party is partly due to United Russia hijacking the former's agenda of a fair redistribution of the nation's natural resources wealth by levying more taxes on oil and metal corporations. However, Mr. Zyuganov is also to blame for his party's defeat. He refused to step back and let his popular deputy, Sergei Glaziev, to lead the party to the parliamentary poll.

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