Everyone is entitled to his or her own opinion about Putin, but you can’t deny that he is one of the strongest politicians in modern Russia. He is an extremely strong leader, who continually solves strategic objectives and provides stability in our country after facing serious challenges following the collapse of the USSR.
Neither the opposition nor the party in power can offer an equally strong figure. It’s also worth noting that our present opposition is not capable of producing constructive solutions to develop the existing system.
This was demonstrated a few days ago when I organised a round table in the Public Chamber for the Russian presidential candidates. It was the first debate of its kind where the experts from the educational field could ask the candidates direct questions about real problems and potential solutions in the education system in Russia. None of the other candidates could present real answers and decisions for the current problems facing Russia and nobody had a real program for Russia’s future development.
I think Putin’s re-election means further development and stability for Russia as well as bringing about change and democratisation. I’m pretty confident that there will be some political concessions and a package of amendments is being prepared. The question now is whether there is actually some real opposition in Russia that is ready and committed to work hard and offer a real and serious program for Russia’s development.
There is a lot being said about whether the voting was fair or not. I think the government is interested in clean and fair elections and they put a lot of money into ensuring that this happened (estimated at 13 billion rubles, $4 billion).
Firstly, the majority of the polling stations were equipped with web-cameras, which meant the world could keep track of the elections.
Another new addition to this year’s observation was a large group of about 200,000 observers. I am the head of the biggest corporation of observers ‘For clean elections’, which has approximately 86,000 members and covered 75,000 polling stations in Russia. The Corp was created on the basis of the Coordination Council of Young Lawyers at the end of January 2012.
So far, we have counted that Putin received 60.9% of votes judging by 9500 protocols received from 86,000 observers from 81 regions of Russia.
With 50,000 protocols, we are counting the number of votes received for Putin and we will publish the alternative variant of the results of Central Electoral Commission after the 15th March.
I feel the international press have a preconceived position and would rather use unverified information than to admit Putin won in an honest battle.
They also couldn’t admit that we were ahead of Great Britain and the USA with the fairness of the election – no other country has taken such a huge step forward with regards to fair elections. The whole world has been able to watch the Russian election and it is hard to admit that Russia comes first in the field of democracy.
