Local Russian election result overturned by court

In an unusual turn of events, a Russian court has overturned the result of a mayoral election in the city of Derbent. Reportedly, riot police used tear gas and shot at voters, preventing them from entering polling stations. Threats were made to local election officials, frightening them enough that more than a third of the polling stations never opened.

The St. Petersburg Times reports that it is “extremely rare” for an election to be overturned, and that in the past cases, judicial interventions were seen as Kremlin machinations to oust successful opposition candidates. That makes the current decision even more noteworthy, since the incumbent, a member of the dominant United Russia party (UR), officially carried the election with 67.52 percent of the vote.

It’s worth asking if the case is linked to a power struggle between Russian President Medvedev and Prime Minister Putin, who, in the 2012 elections, will be eligible to run for a third term as president. There has been growing speculation about a possible rift between the two men, even though Medvedev has said that he and his former political guardian would “agree on how not to elbow each other out and make a decision that is useful for the country.”

Vanity Fair dubbed Putin the world’s most influential person in 2007; Forbes puts him at #3 in 2009, topped only by Hu Jintao and Obama. UR is Putin’s powerbase – after stepping down as president, he became the party’s chairman. And it’s a powerful group indeed, controlling 70 percent of the parliament’s seats and exerting enormous influence on the country.

Putin handpicked Medvedev as his successor, tying him inextricably to UR. But since coming to office, Medvedev has also consolidated his own supporters, replacing officials appointed by Putin with his own men and women. And this court decision comes just days after Medvedev sharply addressed the UR’s 11^th Congress, making clear allusions to electoral fraud: “Sadly, some regional divisions of United Russia. . . show signs of backwardness and concentrate their political activity on intrigues and games within the apparatus,” he said. That intrigue will no longer be tolerated, he suggested, saying “such people need to go, as do some other political customs.”

But Medvedev’s track record doesn’t scream “liberal democrat!” The best indication of what to expect in 2012 might be Putin’s take on elections in general, as he phrased it back in 1998. “One has to be insincere and promise something which you cannot fulfill,” he said. “So you either have to be a fool who does not understand what you are promising, or deliberately be lying.”

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