Baada ya kushinda, Putin amwaga machozi

Rais mpya wa Russia, Vladimir Putin

Vladimir Putin won a huge victory in Russia’s presidential election yesterday.

Early declarations showed he trounced the other four candidates, taking around 62 per cent of the vote.

Opposition figures said the result was tainted by ballot-rigging and bribery.

Mr Putin’s closest rival, veteran communist Gennady Zyuganov, polled only around 17 per cent.

The three other candidates, nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov and left-leaning Sergei Mironov, failed to reach double figures.

With even more allegations of ballot-rigging than in the December parliamentary elections, the landslide seems certain to trigger mass protests. Footage even emerged of one man feeding results into an automated voting machine.

Brigades of police and special forces were massing in Moscow last night in a show of force near the Kremlin.

Other strategic buildings were under heavy guard. ‘It’s a show of strength that suggests the authorities fear a revolution,’ said one observer.

Mr Putin will now serve a third, six-year term in the Kremlin after a four-year absence when he served as prime minister under his protege Dmitry Medvedev with whom he will now do a job swap.

He shed tears while addressing supporters after his victory.

Wanaharakati wakifikisha ujumbe wakati wananchi wa Russia walipokuwa wakipiga kura jana.

Mikhail Kasyanov, Mr Putin’s former prime minister and now an opposition activist, said:

‘These elections are not free, that’s why we will have protests tomorrow. We will not recognise the president as legitimate.’

The results were broadly in line with opinion polls and suggest many Russians retain respect for Mr Putin and the stability he has built following the chaos of the immediate post-Soviet years.

But there were widespread reports of Putin supporters using absentee voting documents to obtain ballot papers.

The same trick can be carried out at polling station after polling station – so-called ‘carousel voting’.

‘We were obviously expecting carousels, but not to this extent,’ said Alexei Navalny, whose anti-corruption campaign galvanised recent street demonstrations.

‘The procedure of vote counting is neither honest nor truthful.’