Russian election protesters give Vladimir Putin a scare

TENS of thousands of people have attended the biggest anti-government protests in the Russian capital Moscow since the fall of the Soviet Union. The protesters gathered on Saturday to condemn alleged ballot-rigging in the parliamentary elections and demand a re-run. Commentators wondered whether this was the start of a Russian Spring?

Kremlin left reeling

Russia and its power-hungry leader Vladimir Putin are still reeling, says Jonathan Steele in The Guardian. The results of last week’s parliamentary elections were a surprise, not just because they revealed the party’s low level of popularity, “but because they were allowed to happen”.
 
Putin has erected a façade of nominally democratic institutions and they went out of control, adds Steele. Now widespread protests are being treated less violently than they would have been in the past. “Will Putin continue this softer approach as the March [presidential] poll approaches?”
 
Putin is buying time

The most cynical explanation is that Putin is buying time, says an editorial in The Times. His “authoritarian instincts are often held in check by pragmatism”. His tactic is to defuse the tensions and use the bureaucracy to crack down on his opponents in the weeks to come.  
 
Shaun Walker in The Independent says: suddenly the Kremlin has a problem. Young, middle-class Russians who turned a blind eye in the past are now taking an interest in politics, and they’re taking to Facebook and Twitter, as well as the streets, to express their discontent.
 
Putin will still almost certainly win the presidential election, says Walker, but the Kremlin now faces a difficult choice. It must open up the political process to criticism and scrutiny, or risk further dissent and radicalising the opposition. “The only certainty is that Russian politics has entered a new phase.”

Democracy a matter of time

This has not been a good year for despots, says Tony Brenton in The Daily Telegraph. It has seen the presidents of Egypt, Tunisia and Libya fall, and placed those of Yemen and Syria on life support. “Is the rising tide of democracy now lapping at Vladimir Putin’s shoes?”
 
Yes – though this is not a “Russian Spring”, says Brenton. The events of the past few days have “cracked the plinth” on which the regime stands. It may take months or years, but it will “only be a matter of time before Russia takes its rightful place among the other European democracies”. ·