Putin's United Russia loses ground in parliamentary election

Still the biggest party, but no longer supermajority.

Well, there you are. Even with fraud, United Russia can’t win it all:

United Russia is “centrist.” (Which probably makes it the most palatable to the West of all of these, but it’s also corrupt to the core.)

The Communist Party of the Russian Federation is Marxist-Leninist with Russian nationalism added. (Isn’t anybody an international socialist any more?!)

A Just Russia is a social-democratic, welfare-statist party.

The Liberal Democratic Party is social-conservative and hyper-nationalist.

So – does this perhaps mean post-Soviet Russia won’t spend the next 70 years or so as a quasi-democracy dominated by one party, like Mexico under the PRI?

I don’t think anyone ever was.

Lenin was – he didn’t even think (at first) that revolution in Russia was important in the general scheme of things, except as it might serve as a spark to ignite the real revolution in the industrialized countries. And the first post-revolution priority, as he saw it, was putting together a United Europe – necessarily predominated by Germany, not Russia.

It’s definitely an interesting development, considering United Russia didn’t expect to lose ground in the Duma. But it won’t have any bearing on the March elections until there is some viable oppositional party.

Rally in Moscow protesting election fraud. Which the international observers found in plenty.

Official results:

Shouldn’t this be in Elections?

Incidentally don’t forget the Russian Communist party unlike during its Soviet days has rehabilitated Stalin and considers him a great man.

Actually, I meant to post it there and wouldn’t object to a move.

I suspect that’s more a matter of their new nationalist-patriotism (Stalin being the man who turned Russia into an industrial superpower and beat back Hitler) than any desire to actually reinstate Stalinism. I do wonder what the CPOTRF would do in a majority; it might have to rethink itself and what it’s about.

The Communist party will still never provide much competition to UR, even if they picked up a substantially higher percentage of the Duma than they did last time. And incidentally there are plenty of Russians who consider Stalin a great man, but I don’t know what that has to do with anything actually.

I would’t consider the results as ‘back to the roots’ as well. I mean in the end, reactions do not always derive from a ‘nostalgic feeling’…It was and still is just worrying how unreal the elections are…Looks like Clinton has her own doubts as well…

NT

Election-fraud protests in cities across Russia. Organized via social-networking sites, I heard on NPR, which means they’re having them even in small, remote cities.