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February 25th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda
Now, after a brief interval in the lesser political post of prime minister, he
seems all but certain to win the presidency again, for the extended six-year
term prescribed by an amended constitution. A further election win after
that could mean he holds office until 2024 – a longer cumulative period in
power than any 20th Century Russian leader except Joseph Stalin.
That prospect has alarmed Moscow’s voters, who have staged vociferous protests
against his candidature. Expectations of vote rigging and corruption are
high after the disputed December 4 parliamentary election, which provoked
the biggest anti-government street demonstrations for a decade, and it is
this that the Citizen Observer’s volunteers hope to counter as Russians go
to the polls again.
The objective, said Inna Kurtyukova, the founder and organiser, is to force Mr
Putin into a second round run-off, by preventing him from gaining through
fraud the 50 per cent of votes he needs to win outright.
Quite who could then beat him is an open question: of his main opponents, one
is an unreconstructed Communist, one is widely regarded as a populist
buffoon and the third, a social democrat, actually endorsed Putin the last
time he ran against him in 2004. Only the fourth, a wealthy oligarch who has
recently turned to politics, appears to offer the new direction some voters
seek.
With its tight organisation and young, educated volunteers, Citizen Observer
shares many of the strengths of the anti-Putin protest movement that first
erupted in December and presented Mr Putin with his gravest domestic
political crisis so far.
Since then, some 200,000 webcams have been ordered by Russia’s electoral
commission, at a cost of £301 million, to keep an impetuous promise Mr Putin
made on television to have images from every polling station streamed live
on the internet.
Russia’s current president, Dmitry Medvedev, who is stepping aside to make way
for Mr Putin, has introduced a last-minute slew of liberalising legislation,
though it will not take effect until after this election.
Even Young Guard, the youth wing of Mr Putin’s ruling United Russia party, has
set up its own “Fair Elections” website intended “to resist
attempts to discredit the March 4 election”.
But Citizen Observer volunteers will be sent to watch over ballot boxes on the
ground, and the organisation has set up a series of roving observer groups,
including reporters and celebrities, who will descend on any polling station
where serious violations are reported.
The volunteers were told that for what Ms Kurtyukova called “really big
frauds”, the movement may deploy the glamorous reality television host
Ksenia Sobchak, 30, whose father Anatoly was Mr Putin’s political mentor.
Miss Sobchak is believed to be Mr Putin’s god-daughter, but is now carving out
a name as an opponent of his return to power – appearing in a recent YouTube
video satirising the crude methods Putin’s campaign is alleged to have used
to coerce public figures into endorsing him.
Tensions are rising in Moscow ahead of next Sunday’s vote, with both pro- and
anti-Putin factions planning demonstrations in the following days. They came
to blows last week while queuing to file rival applications to hold marches
in the same central square.
If a run-off is needed, the likeliest figure to face Mr Putin is Gennady
Zyuganov, the veteran leader of the Communist party who nearly unseated
Boris Yeltsin in 1996, and who wants to renationalise Russia’s natural
assets like oil and gas.
Although his platform of Soviet nostalgia and an updated reading of Marx and
Lenin is attractive to some voters, a poll earlier this month by the
independent Levada Center, put him on just 15 per cent, far behind Mr
Putin’s 66 per cent.
Another veteran candidate is Vladimir Zhirinovsky, leader of the nationalist
Liberal Democratic Party, who wants unemployed Russians to have priority for
jobs over migrants, would scrap income tax for those on less than £200 a
month, and would offer free land to anyone who moves to under-populated
Siberia or Russia’s Far East.
Sergey Mironov, leader of the centre-Left Just Russia party, would raise taxes
for high earners and try to stem capital flight by levying a charge on money
sent out of the country. Levada gives him just six per cent.
But it is Mikhail Prokhorov, a billionaire nickel magnate known as “the
playboy oligarch”, who has attracted most international attention.
The 46-year-old is forcefully campaigning against Mr Putin, to the surprise of
those who saw him as a Kremlin stooge.
According to one popular Moscow rumour, Mr Putin called him personally to ask
him to stand, to lend the election legitimacy – and split the opposition
vote.
A variant told by a Moscow businessman who supports Mr Prokhorov has it that
he has been anointed as Mr Putin’s successor, in return for guaranteed
immunity from prosecution in retirement.
That suggestion elicited a rare smile from the oligarch when put to him on the
campaign trail by The Sunday Telegraph last week. “I hadn’t
heard that one,” he said.
“But I don’t think a leader should be anointed anyway. I’ve never been
anyone’s project in any of my affairs. I am the only independent candidate
and I am very proud that I come from our citizens, not from any political
party.”
The authorities tolerate his campaign because they do not see it as a threat,
he says, but would shut it down immediately were it not for the shift in
public opinion since December.
It is a practised answer – he has faced suspicions of being a Kremlin “plant”
since he first announced his candidacy – but few will buy it. Intriguingly
for his critics, however, he is campaigning as if he really means it.
After visiting a combine harvester factory in Rostov-on-Don to listen to
workers’ concerns, the oligarch opened a business forum with a pitch about
the need for entrepreneurs to form a “new government class”. He
condemned what he called the “tax of corruption” that burdens
business in Mr Putin’s Russia.
Skipping lunch, he then pitched his hopeful vision of Russia’s future to an
audience of several hundred young people, including students, and took
questions for two hours.
Charismatic is not the word for Mr Prokhorov. His face is too often fixed in
an almost robotic frown, and he never seems to get excited, as if his 6’8″
height insulates him from the hurly-burly of the world down below. But his
calm, measured tone and attentive expression makes him likeable, and it
works on a crowd.
If it is a charade, it is a good one. He is campaigning hard, has made himself
accessible to media and the public, and in person he is commanding, self
assured and convincing.
As polling day approaches he is even facing censorship. In the past week his
billboards have been removed in several cities, and his press secretary
complains that the state-controlled national television channels have begun
to ignore him.
Yet questions remain. He was the only candidate to join a “Fair Elections”
march in Moscow earlier this month and promises his own “army of
volunteers” to make the election “as legitimate as possible.”
But he said he would not join demonstrators if they protest against fraud
after the election.
Even though he says that he has committed to politics for the long term, he
has yet to name the new party he says he will launch, and dodges questions
about his political future after his expected defeat. Polls place him in
fourth place nationwide.
Asked whether he would consider a job offer from Mr Putin, he said: “I am
a candidate for the post of president, and discussion of any other
government post is irrelevant.”
He conceded that, as one of those unpopular Russians who made a personal
fortune from the sell-off of state assets, “several years ago my
candidacy would have been impossible”. But, he said, “Russia is
changing, and civil society is changing it. People came to the streets. My
candidacy was only possible because people did that.”
He may, just, be striking a chord. First-time voters who spoke to The
Sunday Telegraph after his question and answer session said they liked
him and his message, and would vote for him.
“I like what he said about a free media, what he said about corruption –
all of it. If it’s true its good,” said Anton, 19, a computer science
student.
But asked whether they believed he posed a genuine challenge to the Kremlin,
they were wary. “Too early to say,” was the common reply.
The latest poll released on Friday showed Mr Putin heading for first round
victory with up to 66 per cent of the vote.
Ms Kurtyukova, the anti-fraud lecturer, believes that this will only be so
because of electoral corruption and a lack of credible opposition candidates.
“If anything,” she said, “there will be more falsification this
time, because the presidential elections are much more important to Putin
than the parliamentary elections.”
She is convinced Mr Putin could never garner honestly the absolute majority
needed to avoid a second round run-off. “Who is voting for Putin?”
she said. “Where are these people? In my district – an ordinary
dormitory suburb of Moscow – I don’t know a single person who says they will.”
In truth, however, it is difficult to gauge public opinion in a country as
vast as Russia. While Mr Putin is increasingly unpopular in the Moscow and
St Petersburg his strength elsewhere seems undiminished. Away from the hall
full of internet-savvy youngsters in Rostov, 600 miles from the Russian
capital, was a constituency that Mr Prokhorov didn’t reach and Ms Kurtyukova
doesn’t know.
“Of course I’ll vote for Putin, who else?” said Rustam, an
Armenian-born businessman who has lived in the city for 40 years.
“Zyuganov is compromised. Zhirinovsky is a clown. Prokhorov is a new
face, but his message is, ‘I stole from you for years, now you should just
forget about it,’
“Putin is a head taller than any of them.”
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