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Putin wins easily, getting 70% of vote
(Agencies)
Updated: 2004-03-15 07:52
Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed victory early Monday after easily
winning a second term with more than 70 percent of the vote, confirming
widespread expectations of a commanding victory. Just minutes after polls
closed, a fire gutted an exhibition hall off Red Square, killing two
firefighters who helped bring the blaze under control.
Russian President
Vladimir Putin gestures as he speaks to media in Moscow in the early hours
of March 15, 2004. Putin swept back into the Kremlin on Sunday with a
landslide election win. [Reuters] | Moscow Mayor
Yuri Luzhkov said neither terrorism nor arson were suspected as the cause of the
fire, which broke out while the building known as the Manezh was unoccupied. By
midnight, Luzhkov said the blaze had been localized.
Two firefighters were killed and one injured, having inhaled poisonous fumes
while combatting the blaze, said Viktor Beltsov, a spokesman for the Emergency
Situations Ministry. The two dead firefighters had been in the building's attic
when it collapsed, ITAR-Tass news agency reported, citing city fire department
spokesman Yevgeny Bobylev.
It wasn't immediately clear what caused the fire that broke out in the wooden
rafters and beams of the roof, Luzhkov said, adding that the ventilation system
may have been at fault.
Assured in advance of victory, Putin was looking for a powerful turnout to
strengthen his grip over Russia - already tightened by his appointment of a new
Cabinet just before the vote and by December parliamentary elections that gave
the main pro-Kremlin party full control over lawmaking.
According to preliminary data, 64.27 percent of voters nationwide had cast
ballots, electoral officials said.
With 49.7 percent of precincts accounted for, Putin had over 70 percent of the vote, the
Central Election Commission said. The partial results were backed up by an
exit poll by the non-governmental Public Opinion Foundation, which surveyed 120,000
voters at 1,200 polling stations and concluded Putin had won more than 70
percent.
"I promise you that for the next four years, I will work in the same mode,"
Putin said.
Putin first thanked voters for turning out, then thanked those who supported
him. He promised to ensure further economic growth, strengthen civil
institutions and media freedom. "All the democratic achievements will be
guaranteed," he said.
Putin, who reined in Russia's independent media following his first election
in 2000, dominated the nationwide television networks before the vote. His five
challengers received less coverage, adding to the widespread impression that the
vote was a one-horse race.
"I voted for Putin because he is going to win anyway, and what is the point
in voting for someone else?" said financial inspector Yelena Chebakova, 31, one
of a handful of early voters at a Moscow polling station.
Secretary of State Colin Powell said he was concerned with a lack of openness
in Russia's presidential election and "a level of authoritarianism creeping
back" into Russian society. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice also
expressed concern.
But Powell said he did not think Russia was reverting to the hard-line ways
of the former Soviet Union.
"Russians have to understand that to have full democracy of the kind that the
international community will recognize, you've got to let candidates have all
access to the media that the president has," Powell said on "Fox News Sunday."
Dmitry Kozak, the head of Putin's campaign headquarters, rejected the
criticism, saying that Russia's election campaign was "in strict conformity with
the election law."
"Russian voters already have significant experience in democratic elections
and don't need suggestions from anyone, even less so from representatives of a
country that has clear flaws in its election procedures," Kozak said in a
statement released Sunday night by the Kremlin press service.
Putin Monday also dismissed US criticism of a presidential poll that saw him
storm to a second term in a landslide reelection. "This is dictated by the
internal political situation" in the United States, Putin told reporters in
televised comments from his campaign headquarters near the Kremlin.
"No one has a right to think that if they criticize others, they cannot be
criticized themselves," he said.
A frenzy of television appeals by Putin, his rivals and even top
religious leaders urging people to vote reflected Kremlin concerns that the lack
of a challenger with a chance of unseating the president might keep Russians
away from the ballot box.
After voting in Moscow on Sunday morning alongside his wife, Lyudmila, Putin
made a last-minute plea, saying that "much depends on this election" and that
"the feeling of involvement must increase year after year."
The election lasted 22 hours, stretching over 11 time zones, before ending at
8 p.m. in the Baltic Sea exclave of Kaliningrad.
Nadezhda, a kindergarten teacher who gave only her first name, didn't need
the encouragement provided by a van that cruised around her Moscow neighborhood
with a loudspeaker shouting that voting is the way to "a dignified life and a
bright future."
"I always vote - it is my country and my responsibility," she said, adding
that she voted for Putin. She said he is "young and energetic" - qualities that
many Russians cite for their support of the trim, 51-year-old president, who has
also benefited from steady economic growth during his first term.
"We voted for Putin because under him there's been stability in society, in
the economy," said Mikhail Antonchik, a young miner who voted with his wife in
Cheryomukhovo, a Ural Mountains village. "You can plan for the family."
But about one-fifth of Russia's 144 million people live in poverty and the
gap between rich and poor remains wide, stoking anger at the authorities.
Communist challenger Nikolai Kharitonov appealed to the poor and polled more
strongly than expected, bringing in 14.3 percent of the vote, according to
preliminary results. Some 3.9 percent of voters checked the box marked "against
all."
Irina Kozhukhova, a 42-year-old radio factory worker in St. Petersburg, said
she'd voted in that category.
"I didn't vote for Putin because I've seen no changes - neither in politics
nor in the economy," she said.
Amid calls by some liberals for a boycott of the vote, which came three
months after parliamentary elections that international observers called a
setback for democracy, rival candidates and rights groups alleged vote-rigging
in favor of Putin, including pre-marked ballots and pressure on students and
soldiers.
"The authorities are resorting to pressuring the electorate and abusing their
powers to manipulate the vote," nationalist candidate Sergei Glazyev told The
Associated Press at an election monitoring center he set up jointly with
Kharitonov and liberal candidate Irina Khakamada.
Citing monitors, the joint center said that patients at a Moscow psychiatric
hospital had complained that the ballots they received were already marked for
Putin.
VOICE, a grass-roots election monitoring association, reported that officers
at a military base in the Volga River region of Samara received telegrams from
the Defense Ministry ordering them to tell their superiors, in writing, the time
they and their family members voted. Students at Samara State Aerospace
University were threatened with eviction from their dormitory if they didn't
vote, VOICE alleged.
Putin did not campaign openly, relying instead on his image as a stable,
disciplined leader to appeal to a nation still traumatized by the political and
social upheavals that followed the 1991 Soviet collapse.
In addition to Kharitonov, Khakamada and Glazyev, Putin faced Oleg Malyshkin,
the little-known candidate from flamboyant nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky's
party, and Sergei Mironov, the speaker of the upper house of parliament, who has
said he was running to support the incumbent. Glazyev polled 4.7 percent and
Khakamada 4.6 percent, according to preliminary results.
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