kopfmaennchen

As 99,73% of votes are proceeded – some call it counted – by now, one can hardly imagine that there will be any change in the results: Political engineering and Image making in Russia, whether legal or not, has provided 70,24% victory to Dmitrij Medvedjev in the presidential elections. The result is not really surprising. More important is the fact that voter turnout (about 69%) was considerably higher than in the 2004 elections.

This might be valued as a strong legitimation for Medvedjev. But this also means that out of the about 109 Million eligible voters, only 48% voted for Medvedjev, while 30%+ didn’t vote at all and the rest selected another candidate. What this fact really indicates is that the candidates were able to mobilize their following. Taking into account theb results of political opinion research the results of nationalist Zhirinovski (9,36%) and communist Zyuganov (17,75%) come very close to their real potential. Most of the non-voter then seem to have withdrawn from politics because of the predictable outcomes.

But will there be a new direction of russian politics? We strongly disbelieve the moderate optimism in western politics. The designated president stated that he will – together with a Prime Minister Putin – continue the work of his predecessor. Even if there will be no new distribution of power between those two institutions (as Medvedjev indicated today), the influence of the Prime Minister will probably stay rather high. And, by the way, as all pc-owners, might know: never change a running system. For Russia the current configuration of the clearly authoritarian political system seems to run pretty well.

But it is much too early to give an in-depth analysis, even though many journalists and even political scientists will come up with such in the next few days and weeks. In our opinion, one at least has to a 100-day period to get a closer idea of what path of development Russia will chose in the Future.

There are elections going on in Russia at the moment. Considering the developments in the political system of Russia in the last few years, they cannot be called democratic in any way. They seem to be part of the emerging so called “russian way to postmodernism”, that is openly authoritarian. Elections and electoral engineering are part of a complex system of electoral authoritarianism (Schedler) that evolved under Putins regency and reduced elections to plebiscitarian functions. As his close ally Dmitrij Medvedjew is supposed to be the winner of the elections, there are signs that this system will be stabilized and last for at least the next electoral term.

Kopfmaennchen are closely observing the elections and will come up with an in-depth analysis later this year. In Addition we hope to be able to provide a short analysis in the next few days.