In the run-up to the presidential election, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin compared the campaign to Russia’s 1812 battle for Moscow against Napoleon, quoting from a classic poem to ask people to support him.
However, the 2012 battle for Moscow appears to have been lost by Putin’s team, with the Kremlin now sitting in a city where the majority of people voted against him in Sunday’s presidential vote.
Official polling figures in Moscow said that Putin was supported by less than 47 percent of the 4.3 million people who voted in the Russian capital on Sunday.
Photo: AFP
A tally taken down by independent monitors in Moscow and sent in from polling stations to the observers group Golos — which alleged mass violations — gives an even lower figure of 45 percent for Putin.
By contrast, Putin won 63.6 percent nationwide according to official figures, with his weakness in Moscow compensated by strong support in central Russia and credibility-busting ratings well into the 90s in the Caucasus.
The 16-point difference between support for Putin nationwide and in Moscow is a “rift that will not go away,” said Maria Lipman of the Moscow Carnegie Center.
“It will get deeper and deeper and will be a problem for the legitimacy of Putin’s authority,” she said.
The capital — home to 8 percent of the country’s population — also has the greatest concentration of Russia’s fast expanding middle class, who have embraced the Internet and been at the forefront of the anti-Putin protest movement.
Speaking to supporters packed into Moscow’s largest stadium two weeks ago, Putin sought inspiration from a work by romantic poet Mikhail Lermontov which chronicles Russia’s defense of Moscow from French “infidels.”
“How can we not think back to Lermontov and his heroes ... who pledged allegiance to the Motherland before the battle for Moscow and dreamed of dying for it?” Putin asked.
However, Putin’s performance in the capital was startlingly weak given the state resources he enjoys. Tycoon Mikhail Prokhorov came in second with a substantial 20.45 percent.
There were numerous reports of dirty tricks on election day, such as more than 100 buses bringing Putin’s youth supporters from other regions to vote in Moscow with absentee ballots.
The clear effort to bring loyal voters to the capital shows the authorities’ worry that in Moscow “casting of critical votes needs to be diluted for an acceptable result,” Lipman said.
After Putin tearfully thanked Russian citizens in Moscow pn Sunday evening, residents of the capital made the name of a Soviet-era Oscar-winning film Moscow Does not Believe in Tears into a new protest slogan.
“I don’t know how the newly elected president, whom many do not consider a lawful president, will behave,” said detective novelist Boris Akunin, who has become one of the top activists speaking for the protest movement.
“How he is going to live and work in his capital, which regards him with hostility, where even with all the [fraud] it turns out that the majority of this city are opposed to him?” he asked.
“Putin is not a hero for Moscow,” wrote Tatyana Lysova, the editor of Russia’s leading business daily, Vedomosti.
She said that mayor Sergei Sobyanin’s congratulatory message to Putin after the election was inappropriately addressed from all Muscovites.
“Moscow does not need anything from him,” she wrote.
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