Russia | 77pct voted for re-election: Putin gains massive mandate for nationalist policies

Russian President Vladimir Putin won a fourth presidential term with nearly 77 percent of the vote — his highest score ever and a massive mandate to pursue his nationalist, assertive policies for another six years in power.

Near-final results released yesterday showed that the other seven candidates were far behind Putin in Sunday’s voting.

Observers reported widespread ballot stuffing and unprecedented pressure on Russians to vote, but that is unlikely to seriously damage Putin given his popularity and his tight control over Russian politics.

With 99.8 percent of the vote counted, the Central Election Commission said yesterday that communist Pavel Grudinin came in a distant second with 11.8 percent. Third was ultranationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky with 5.6 percent. The only candidate to openly criticize Putin during the campaign, liberal TV star Ksenia Sobchak, won just 1.6 percent.

Putin’s most serious rival, opposition leader Alexei Navalny, was barred from the race.

The electoral commission said official turnout was 67 percent, but the figure was thrown into question by images circulating online of ballot stuffing and nationwide accounts of workers being coerced to vote.

Putin has never faced a serious threat to his rule since he came to power on the eve of the new millennium. He won 53 percent of the vote in the 2000 presidential election, 71 percent in 2004 and 63 percent in 2012.

The massive victory gives Putin new confidence to stand up to the West.

The election came amid escalating Cold War-like tensions, with accusations that Moscow was behind the nerve-agent poisoning this month of a former Russian double agent in Britain and that its internet trolls had waged an extensive campaign to undermine the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

The accusations ultimately bolstered Putin among a populace that sees him as their defender against a hostile outside world and the embodiment of Russia’s resurgent power on the world stage.

The election was such a foregone conclusion that Putin gave only a perfunctory victory speech and said nothing about what he will do for his country.

“We are bound for success,” he said, to crowds near the Kremlin chanting “Russia! Russia!”

Putin’s victory puts his opponents in a tough spot.

Navalny called for a boycott but it’s unclear whether that had any effect. He then clashed publicly with Sobchak on Sunday night, accusing her of being a Kremlin stooge. Both were silent Monday, and their future plans are unclear.

Putin’s electoral power has centered on stability, a quality cherished by Russians after the chaotic breakup of the Soviet Union. But that stability has been bolstered by a suppression of dissent, the withering of independent media and the top-down control of politics called “managed democracy.”

That included pressure on voters to fulfil their “civic duty.”

Two election observers in Gorny Shchit, a rural district of Yekaterinburg, told The Associated Press they saw an unusually high influx of people going to the polls just before 2 p.m. A doctor at a hospital in the Ural mountains city told the AP that 2 p.m. was the deadline for health officials to report to their superiors that they had voted. Angela Charlton and Vladimir Isachenkov, Moscow, AP