RUSSIA: President Vladimir Putin yesterday hailed his supporters' crushing victory in parliamentary elections as a good thing for Russian democracy, while political opponents and international observers said the poll was unfair and undermined by pro-Kremlin bias.
With 98 per cent of votes counted after Sunday's ballot, the United Russia party had 37.1 per cent, almost three times the count of the Communists on 12.7 per cent, with the ultra-nationalist Liberal Democratic Party in third on 11.6 per cent.
The Communist Party faced losing half its seats in the State Duma, Russia's lower house of parliament, many to the Motherland bloc that the Kremlin created to steal votes from its strongest traditional opponent.
Motherland, an odd motley of nationalists and left-wingers, was running fourth with 9.1 per cent of votes.
The main liberal parties were in shock at failing to garner the 5 per cent minimum needed to enter the legislature as a party bloc, and had to pin hopes on winning seats in individual district ballots around the country. Turnout was 58 per cent, election officials said, down from 62 per cent in 1999.
Some 5 per cent of voters chose "Against All" over the 23 parties vying for the Duma's 450 seats, in an election that Mr Putin called "another step in strengthening democracy in the Russian Federation." The United States and Western election observers begged to differ.
"In this election, the enormous advantage of incumbency and access to state equipment, resources and buildings led to the election result being overwhelmingly distorted," said Mr Bruce George, president of the parliamentary assembly of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).
Mr George highlighted biased television coverage as a key factor favouring pro-Kremlin parties in an election he said was free but not fair.
"It is even more regrettable that the main impression of the overall electoral process is that it was one of regression in the democratisation process of this country," he told reporters in Moscow.
Mr Scott McClellan, a White House spokesman, said: "We share those concerns," adding that worries over the fairness of the poll "underlines the importance of Russian legislators dedicating themselves to pushing through the political and economic reform agenda."
Mr Boris Nemtsov, a leader of the Union of Right-Wing Forces (SPS) party, said the defeat of his bloc and fellow liberals Yabloko meant a strengthening of power for hardliners and the increasingly influential former KGB comrades of Mr Putin.
"The \ majority will belong to those who stand for a police state, for curtailing civic freedoms, for shutting down independent judicial authority" and for antagonistic relations with neighbours and the West, Mr Nemtsov said.
Communist Party leader Mr Gennady Zyuganov said he would not accept the election result until his party had completed its own vote count.
"You are all participants in a revolting spectacle which for some reason is called an election," he told reporters.
The leaders of Motherland, Mr Sergei Glazyev and Mr Dmitry Rogozin, campaigned on a law-and-order platform aimed at tycoons like Mr Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former head of oil firm Yukos who was jailed in October and charged with tax fraud.
Mr Glazyev, who abandoned the Communists to form Motherland, said yesterday he wanted to reverse the rigged privatisations of the 1990s that created "oligarchs" like Mr Khodorkovsky.
However, under pressure from foreign investors who want a stable business climate, Mr Putin has pledged not to revisit those agreements.