Russia goes to the polls on Sunday under a shadow. Many foreign observers will be scattered across the country, but the West’s preferred agency for election observing, the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OCSE), claims it was blocked from sending monitors to Moscow.
The Kremlin sees the OSCE as a Western battering ram that uses charges of election fraud to destabilise regimes Washington dislikes. When the British MP Bruce George, an OSCE observer, said in October that ”there is no way it will find Russia’s elections meet international standards”, Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin, saw red.
Election observers are not calculating machines or Olympian observers. If they were called by their day jobs –politicians, diplomats, even the odd spy — would we believe them ÂÂimplicitly?
If both the Kremlin and the West are playing politics, what matters is whether Russians are getting the government they want, or at least deserve.
Many Russians want democracy as defined by Max Weber: ”The people choose a leader in whom they trust. Then the chosen leader says, ‘Now shut up and obey me.”’
Like Weber, most Russians also like to ”sit in judgement” on the ruler every few years, but they are not much interested in a Western-style separation of powers.
Russians despised Boris Yeltsin for the corrupt chaos of the 1990s, and Putin is admired for putting his house in order. When they look at the opposition types embraced by Western embassies and NGOs, Russians fear the West wants to reverse Putin’s economic improvements and bring back chaos.
Since the Russian opposition is hopelessly unpopular, perhaps Putin should have gerrymandered the electoral system to give his opponents a few seats.
Many European election experts used to criticise Russia’s single-member constituencies, arguing that local Mafia bosses could manipulate the results. But the system also allowed liberal mavericks to get elected against the national tide.
Sadly, concerns about Russia’s electoral hurdles denying legitimate candidates and minority parties a chance have been swamped by the row over election observers.
Who remembers — as many Russians do — that the OSCE’s predecessors in 1993 ignored blatant fraud to get Yeltsin’s constitution approved by more than 50%?
It isn’t only the Kremlin that has a dodgy election record in Russia. When it comes to admitting monitors, only Britain has a worse record in the OSCE than the US, so Putin’s charge of double standards carries weight. Belatedly, in 2005, Whitehall permitted a number of observers to ”learn” from its elections. Diplomats were escorted around a few polling stations but not allowed to observe the count.
As for American efforts to foster ”democracy education” in Russia, Russians spit back one word: ”Florida”. After the shenanigans in Jeb’s state in 2000 came Ohio in 2004. The election hung on the outcome in Cleveland, where the chairperson of the campaign to re-elect George Bush was also in charge of counting the votes.
Russians resent the fact that the OSCE made no fuss about those flaws.
When it comes to election fraud, there is enough hypocrisy to go round East and West.
What makes democracy work is not foreign observers hovering over an election but the political culture of the voting society. Vigilant publics ensure democracy, not international observers.
Russians may still have a long way to go, but should Westerners be so certain their elections are beyond reproach? — Â