Russia goes to the polls tomorrow under a shadow. Although many foreign observers will be scattered across the vast country, the West's preferred agency for observing elections, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), claims it was blocked from sending monitors to Moscow.
The Kremlin sees the OSCE as a Western battering ram which uses charges of election fraud to destabilize regimes disliked by Washington. When the British Labour Member of Parliament Bruce George, who is big in election observing for the OSCE, said in October that "there is no way that it will find that Russia's elections meet international standards," Russian President Vladimir Putin saw red.
Even if the Kremlin has something to hide, election observers are neither mere calculating machines nor Olympian observers. If they were called by their day jobs -- politicians, diplomats, even the odd spy -- would we believe them implicitly? If both the Kremlin and the West are playing politics, what matters is whether Russians are getting the government they want, or at least deserve.
Many Russians want democracy as defined by Max Weber: "The people choose a leader in whom they trust. Then the chosen leader says, `Now shut up and obey me.'"
To be fair, like Weber, most Russians also like to "sit in judgment" on the ruler every few years, but they are not much interested in Western-style separation of powers.
Russians despised former president Boris Yeltsin for the corrupt chaos of the 1990s. Putin is admired for putting his house in order. Looking back to the katastroika under Yeltsin -- applauded in the West -- few Russians worry about how Putin got results. When they look at the opposition types embraced by Western embassies and non-governmental organizations, Russians fear we want to reverse Putin's economic improvements and bring back chaos.
Westerners think of opposition leader Gary Kasparov as a chess champion, but Russians also remember him as the proponent of the "robber baron" model of capitalism. Worse still, Kasparov links arms at demonstrations with Eddie Limonov of the National Bolsheviks, who is so extreme he makes Liberal Democratic Party leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky seem liberal.
Since the Russian opposition is hopelessly unpopular, perhaps Putin should have gerrymandered the electoral system to give his opponents a handful of seats. Any worthwhile parliament has its awkward squad.
Let's remember that many European election experts used to criticize Russia's single-member constituencies. They argued that local mafia bosses could manipulate the results; but the system also allowed liberal mavericks to get elected against the national tide. Sadly, concerns about the electoral hurdles in Russia denying legitimate candidates and minority parties a chance have been swamped by the row over election observers.
Who remembers -- as many Russians do -- how the OSCE's predecessors in 1993 ignored blatant fraud to get Yeltsin's Constitution approved by over 50 percent? It isn't only the Kremlin that has a dodgy election record in Russia.
When it comes to admitting independent monitors, only Britain has a worse record in the OSCE than the US, so Putin's charge of double standards carries weight. Belatedly, in 2005, Whitehall permitted a number of observers to "learn" from our elections. Diplomats were escorted around a few polling stations but not allowed to observe the count, let alone pass judgment. The UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office would protest if its observers were controlled that way.
As for US efforts to foster "democracy education" in Russia, the natives spit back one word: "Florida." After the shenanigans in former Florida governor Jeb Bush's state in 2000 came Ohio in 2004. The election hung on the outcome in Cleveland, where the chairman of the campaign to re-elect US President George W. Bush was also in charge of counting the votes. Russians resent that the OSCE made no great issue out of the flaws in either.
When it comes to election fraud, there is enough hypocrisy to go round east and West. Even in well-established democracies politics is about power, and democrats will bend the rules to come out on top. It is better that they play dirty with the ballot box than play rough in the streets, but it is not nice.
What makes democracy work is not foreign observers hovering over an election but the political culture of the voting society. Vigilant publics ensure democracy, not international observers. Russians may still have a long way to go, but should Westerners be so certain that our elections are beyond reproach?
Mark Almond is a history lecturer at Oriel College, Oxford, and has observed elections across OSCE member states.
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) trip to China provides a pertinent reminder of why Taiwanese protested so vociferously against attempts to force through the cross-strait service trade agreement in 2014 and why, since Ma’s presidential election win in 2012, they have not voted in another Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate. While the nation narrowly avoided tragedy — the treaty would have put Taiwan on the path toward the demobilization of its democracy, which Courtney Donovan Smith wrote about in the Taipei Times in “With the Sunflower movement Taiwan dodged a bullet” — Ma’s political swansong in China, which included fawning dithyrambs