The statement is reproduced below in full:

The European Parliament has condemned shortcomings and irregularities in the preparation and conduct of Russia’s 4 March presidential elections. In a resolution passed on Thursday, it called on Vladimir Putin to tone down his rhetoric against the protestors and begin a “sincere dialogue” with them.

MEPs point to the continuing concern “about developments in Russia with regard to human rights and commonly agreed democratic principles, electoral rules and procedures”.

Irregularities in the electoral process

Parliament regrets that the choice of voters was limited in the recent elections and demands comprehensive analyses of “all irregularities with a view to strengthening democratic rules for future elections”.

It points out that international election observers from the OSCE/Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) and the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly, found that the presidential elections were “deeply skewed in favour of one candidate through shortcomings in the registration process, unequal media coverage and the use of State resources in favour of one candidate”.

Call for reform

MEPs ask President Medvedev to turn words into deeds and guarantee that the necessary reforms to the political system are made. They also “expect that the new Russian President Vladimir Putin will be ready to take them forward, including the much needed simplification of rules governing the registration of political parties”.

The resolution urges all sides to take the opportunity, before the new president is inaugurated, to decide on a comprehensive reform package. It expects president-elect Putin as well as political parties represented in the State Duma to start a dialogue with the protestors and opposition on the country’s future.

Finally, Parliament encourages Russian democratic opposition groups to unite more closely around political reforms, thus affording Russian citizens a credible alternative.

An original resolution issued by the European Parliament in response to Russia’s March 4 presidential election was labeled as “too soft” by United Civil Front leader Garry Kasparov and opposition politician Mikhail Kasyanov, as well as several MEPs from the European People’s Party and the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe. The original made note of electoral violations but did not support any sort of sanctions against Moscow. With Thursday’s statement, an eventual amended version of the resolution is expected to be harsher.

Everyone to the referendum!

The inevitability of Putin’s victory during the first round of voting has become the main ammunition for the Kremlin’s propagandists, busily going about brainwashing voters. Russia’s main polling organizations – the Public Opinion Foundation, the Russian Public Opinion Research Center, and the Levada Center – are literally chomping at the bit to please the Kremlin with bigger and better numbers. A carefully selected list of sparring partners gives the painfully tired argument “and who, if not Him” more weight.

The opponents of Putin who are making a formal bid for the presidency of this great country actually look a lot like comic personalities from Soviet cinema. The troika of Sergei Mironov, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, and Gennady Zyuganov bears a close resemblance to Leonid Gaidai’s Three Soviet Stooges, and in some cases bear physical similarities as well. Meanwhile, the lone figure of Mikhail Prokhorov smacks of the lanky provincial nobility. In fact, Putin’s hysterical electoral campaign seems to imply that Putin sees his relationship with Russia as a dilemma reminiscent of Gaidai’s classic comedy about kidnapping a woman in hopes of marrying her: “Either I bring her to get the marriage certificate signed, or she brings me to the prosecutor.”

Of course, it’s hard to argue with the logic of those who, for aesthetic reasons, say we should “cross out” all the names on our ballots. But here we need to consider that the Central Electoral Commission might count any ballots marked like this – “against all” – as spoiled, and not count them as part of the overall number of votes cast.

Therefore, before we attempt to solve the Kremlin’s puzzle, let’s review the raw data:

1. The March 4 election will not be legitimate, since each stage of this most important political process, from the passing of electoral legislation to the opportunities for registered candidates to carry out full-fledged campaigns, involved rude violations that infringed upon the constitutional rights of Russian citizens.

2. The ideological basis of the protest movement consists of the demands set forth in the resolutions taken on Bolotnaya Square and on Sakharov Prospect. Among those, one of the conditions for normalizing political life in the country is listed as an early presidential election, carried out according to new regulations that actually correspond to the Russian constitution.

3. Regardless of what results Churov’s electoral commission announces on the night of March 4, we need to continue the fight to hold early presidential and parliamentary elections. Even if we imagine for a second that the winner’s last name is more than five letters long, this does not in principle change anything in regards to our demands to provide Russian citizens with the right to choose a legitimate government through free and fair elections.

Following this logic, we’d ought to look at the March 4 election as an opportunity for us once and for all to delegitimize the Putin regime – and, correspondingly, as an opportunity to mobilize a significant number of non-apathetic Russian citizens to come out to mass protests. Therefore, it doesn’t make any difference who we vote for, as long as we vote against Putin.

There’s no need to torment yourself with redundant doubts – we will not be participating in a real presidential election on March 4. On this day we will be holding a de-facto referendum in expressing our distrust of Vladimir Putin, and a high voter turnout could quite possibly upset all the calculations by the Kremlin’s political spin doctors. And the four boxes across from the names that the Kremlin’s will has allowed to be on that list – these are just four ways that you can say no to the swindlers and thieves who have usurped power in Russia.

According to the party, the country’s opposition parties are “getting ahead of themselves” by holding protests against expected falsifications of the upcoming election.

Party secretary Sergei Neverov expressed certainty that both the non-systemic and systemic opposition “are looking to justify their fiascos ahead of time because they know that none of their candidates can present Vladimir Putin with any kind of real competition.”

Neverov believes that the election results will be denounced by the opposition as falsified no matter what they are. In his opinion, oppositionists “don’t need fair presidential elections; they’re prepared to use any electoral campaign as a means to discredit the existing political system.”

He also argued that opposition forces were “acting irresponsibly” and that they saw the fate of the country as “loose change.”

The complaints come a week after State Duma deputies from United Russia asked deputies from the Communist Party, Liberal Democratic Party and A Just Russia to “make a joint anti-orange revolution” resolution in response to a wave of mass protests against blatant electoral fraud in December parliamentary elections. The three parties rejected the plea.

“We’re currently formulating a suit in this regard,” Grigory Yavlinsky told journalists on Friday.

Earlier in the day, Yavlinsky received an official notice from the commission (TsIK) that he would not be allowed to run as a presidential candidate in the upcoming March election.

According to the TsIK, about 25 percent of the signatures on Yavlinsky’s petition had been falsified, well above the 5 percent permitted by Russian law. However, the party insists that the rejection was politically motivated.

On January 24, the newspaper Vedomosti reported that a source in the presidential administration said that Yavlinsky’s rejection was a “surprise” to the Kremlin. In addition, an anonymous source in the TsIK said that the number of bad signatures collected by other presidential candidates was about the same as Yavlinsky’s – this likely due to the difficulty of collecting 2 million signatures in the one-month time limit and the inability of candidates to oversee the work of all of their signature collectors.

According to political analyst Mikhail Tulsky, only 100,000 signatures were needed to run for president in 1991. In 1996 the number rose to 1 million, but candidates were given 3 months to collect them. It rose again to 2 million in 2004, with 7 percent falsified signatures allowed. Since 2007, that number dropped to 5 percent, and the length of time to collect them dropped to a month. Billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov, who has recently successfully completed the registration process, denounced it as “dishonest” and “degrading.”

According to Gorbachev, “I, for example, feel that after Putin went through two terms as president and now another term as prime minister that, I think, this story of a duumvirate, while it meets constitutional requirements, nevertheless essentially discredits democratic principles.”

In the former president’s opinion, the development of democracy in Russia is impossible while the people in charge of the country are not its actual leaders and do not defend the people’s interests.

Gorbachev believes that Russia’s leader should respect the rights of the people instead of the rights of “corporations.”

He also expressed doubt that upcoming parliamentary elections would be free and fair. Gorbachev labeled the ruling regime as “authoritarian” and said that the country can expect to have “to seriously fight for the rehabilitation of democratic principles, fair elections, and independent courts.”

He also said that voters should use the forthcoming elections as an opportunity to speak out against the current regime by voting against United Russia.

As the BBC also pointed out, other world leaders are less than thrilled at the idea of Putin taking up a third term as Russian president. Former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that Putin’s decision “makes a bit of a mockery of the electoral process” and was “unfortunate.”

Putin’s press secretary, Dmitri Peskov, called Rice’s remarks “disrespectful.”

The president’s supporters were hard pressed to maintain their illusions after September 24, when Medvedev announced that he would not be running in the 2011 presidential elections: the gauntlet would instead be passed back to Putin, now likely to remain in office until at least 2024. Some, like Arkady Dvorkovich, were vocal in their disappointment. Others continue to invest their faith in the president’s purported agenda of modernization. It is the latter that opposition leader Garry Kasparov confronts in this new op-ed.

Turning the Chessboard
By Garry Kasparov
October 7, 2011

After the public humiliation of Medvedev on September 24, one would think that even his most devout followers, the ones who tried in vain to find the reform-minded characteristics of a “liberating tsar” in the pale image of Putin’s shadow, had ought to have turned their backs on him. The first one to emerge from their stupor was Sergei Aleksashenko (naturally, the people with the most direct connections to money will react to the operative changes of a situation quicker than others), who decided to refute our image of Medvedev as a weak leader without any willpower. After that, Igor Jurgens told us unabashedly that, regardless of the apocalyptic predictions that he and Yevgeny Gontmakher have been eagerly feeding the Russian press over the course of the past year, life is not going to end after Putin’s return to the Kremlin. “We will continue modernization, because there’s no other option,” – with this phrase, one of the main ideologues of systemic Russian liberalism has once again confirmed that the members of the Institute of Contemporary Development saw the campaign in support of Medvedev as a purely tactical measure related to additional opportunities to influence the situation in the country. Whereas it is impossible for liberals of the court to have strategic differences with the Putin regime.

Today, Ekho Moskvy Editor-in-Chief Aleksei Venediktov also spoke to both the country and the world about Medvedev’s grandiose reforms that we have failed to notice, reforms that do no less than begin to dismantle the Gulag. Medvedev, it turns out, has begun deep reforms in the sphere of human and civil rights, a sphere that not Khrushchev, nor Gorbachev, nor Yeltsin were able to take a stab at. Nikita Sergeyevich, of course, did not have enough of Medvedev’s polish, and he had a proletarian disdain for bourgeois civil rights and freedoms, but it’s his name that’s associated with the release of millions of Gulag prisoners – and, by the way, the denouncement of the cult of personality (Stalin’s, not Putin’s).

Venediktov writes that “the time has come to flip the chessboard and try to see all of this from white’s point of view.” First of all, I don’t understand at all why the Kremlin government is a priori given the white pieces, and, moreover, chess analogies are unlikely to be appropriate when talking about the Putin regime. Chess has clear rules that are obligatory for both sides, and the Kremlin, as we known, are always free to change whatever rules don’t fit into their Procrustean bed of political expediency. In fact, Aleksei Alekseyevich, I would like to note that “flipping the chessboard” is a term from the movie Gentlemen of Fortune, where it became customary to wipe the pieces off the board and smash it over the head of one’s opponent. When talking about chess, we usually say that the board is “turned.” And so, having turned the board, we see the position from white’s side. I see the Yukos case; I see the deaths of Magnitsky and Aleksanyan; Taisiya Osipova, who is being bullied by jailers and prosecutors with impunity; I see a tightening of so-called anti-extremist legislation; there’s a monstrous growth of corruption alongside the total lawlessness of the security services, I see that; I see a political space that has been completely paved over – but deep reforms in our system of rights, excuse me, I don’t see. Obviously, I lack the proper qualifications…

The announcement came on Saturday during the second day of a congress of Putin’s United Russia party and was received by a standing ovation by the 11,000 members present.

He added that current President Dmitri Medvedev “can create an effective management team as the head of the Russian government,” meaning that he would name Medvedev as prime minister during his own presidency.

Analysts have clashed over which member of Russia’s ruling tandem would run in the upcoming elections since the day Medvedev was elected. All but confirming the long-held belief of many Kremlin critics that Medvedev was doing little more than keeping the seat warm for Putin to return to office four years later, Putin made clear that “an agreement over what to do in the future was reached between us several years ago.”

Russian law only allows the same person to be president for two consecutive terms, but also allows that person to run again after a “hiatus” period. As Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty points out:

Putin’s victory in March is a virtual certainty, given both his popularity and Russia’s tightly controlled political system. It would set the stage for him to serve two six year terms, which would keep him in the Kremlin until 2024, meaning he could end up running the country longer than Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, whose 18-year rule became synonymous with socioeconomic decay.

Analysts are also split as to whether Putin and Medvedev differ in regards to policy, as opposed to fronting mere cosmetic or other orchestrated differences to lend the regime a veneer of legitimacy. Nevertheless, Medvedev had garnered a number of loyal supporters over the years and they were none too pleased with what Gleb Pavlovsky of the Foundation for Effective Policy called “Medvedev’s political capitulation.” As the New York Times puts it:

One of Mr. Medvedev’s closest aides, Arkady V. Dvorkovich, vented via Twitter during the United Russia event, remarking, first, “there is no reason for happiness,” and then “now it is time to switch to the sports channel.” The influential political consultant Gleb O. Pavlovsky, whose longstanding contract with the Kremlin was severed this spring, gave one of the sharpest comments.

“The fact that the president, as a politician, betrayed those who believed in him — that is political self-annihilation, and he has the right to do it,” Mr. Pavlovsky said. He called the move “a blow to the prestige of the institution of the presidency in Russia.”

Several politicians and analysts gave their takes on the announcement to Gazeta.ru.

Gleb Pavlovsky, head of the Foundation for Effective Policy

“This is Medvedev’s political capitulation. It’s possible that it was voluntary and possible that it wasn’t. It’s unclear what sort of pressure we’ve hit up against here. But there’s a unique fact: the post of the president of a nuclear power is being transferred by private dealings. We have no reason to believe that Medvedev was lying when he said he was ready to run for president. It’s possible that his position changed due to the influence of a certain factor.

“If he’s a real politician, he needs to explain why he made this decision and why he felt that his own presidency was unsuccessful. If not, then it’s unclear what he’s doing at the head of United Russia’s candidate list.”

Sergei Mironov, leader of A Just Russia

“All these years, we have had serious problems with the work of the government. And bigger ones with the United Russia party… We maintain our previous positions: our party will not support the candidate forwarded by United Russia. And so we’re in no rush. Let our opponents rush… in regards to the fact that Medvedev is heading the Duma list – watch the video footage of the faces of the United Russia members and see if they look happy about it or not.”

Aleksei Malashenko, member of the Carnegie Moscow Center

“When this decision was definitively made is already meaningless, but it seems to me that it happened not at all long ago, after the forum in Yaroslavl. Everything came to that, although there were still grounds for speculation. What became definitively clear was that our political life is a swamp. And the US and the European Union have already looked to Putin to gauge things for a long time. The most interesting thing now, the only intrigue, is who’s going to become prime minister. There isn’t 100% certainty that the decision for it to be Medvedev is definitive. There’s expectation of pension system reform and a high rise in taxes. And it’s the prime minister who gets the most flack.”

Boris Nemtsov, co-leader of the unregistered People’s Freedom Party

“Putin is a pure provocateur: he is provoking the Russian people to a revolt.

He is provoking the Russian people with his irremovability, provoking the Russian people to come out into the streets and begin to act like they do in countries where the institution of the turnover of government has been destroyed. After a month, the Central Bank will announce how much money has disappeared. Trust me, I am rarely mistaken: $100 billion. That’s my analysis – $100 billion and the emigration of 500-800 thousand people.

“The country is going to experience a certain amount of sluggish development, but this is very bad… Unhappy Russia: Putin is back until his death. I don’t know how long he’s going to live. Either Russia will die first or Putin will – I don’t know. I’d prefer all the same that Russia remained.

With Russia’s next presidential election less than a year away, political analysts are obsessing over every last statement by members of the ruling tandem. With eleven long months of intrigue yet ahead, the Communist Party clearly grasped the appeal of some electoral comic relief – as their more than 1.6 million YouTube views since March 30 attest.

On Tuesday, another user posted an English-subtitled version of the video:

But the country’s leading political party, United Russia, dropped a bomb on the media today with news that it plans to support Putin in the election regardless.

As the Moscow Times and Reuters report:

The ruling United Russia party wants Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to stand in the 2012 presidential election, a top party official said Thursday.

“As for the party’s position on the 2012 elections, United Russia will orient itself on its leader Vladimir Putin,” said Yury Shuvalov, deputy secretary of the presidium of the party’s General Council, Interfax reported.

“Of course, we’d like to see Putin head the United Russia party list in December” for the State Duma vote, Shuvalov said. “And it’s his candidacy that we’re considering in the first place when deciding on a party candidate for the presidential elections.”

Putin heads United Russia without being a member. Uncertainty over whether he will return to the presidency, which he held in 2000-08, or back incumbent Dmitry Medvedev has pushed factions of the political elite to weigh in on the issue.

Both Putin and Medvedev have hinted they may run in the election, but each has said they will make the decision together.

But as the elections draw ever nearer, Medvedev’s assumed withdrawal into the background is becoming harder to take for granted. In November 2009, Medvedev told the German newspaper Der Spiegel that “We will sit down and discuss which one of us is going to run in the election, so that we don’t interfere with each other.” Putin had said a few months earlier that the two would “come to an agreement because we are people of one blood and one set of political views,” and the president has confirmed that the “one blood” sentiment is mutual.

But this past weekend was the first time, at least publically, that Medvedev has discussed the 2012 presidential elections without mentioning Putin at all. In an interview with the widely-circulated Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten, the president stated: “If it’s going to be necessary for my country and so to preserve the course that’s been formed in recent years (by which I refer to the period when Vladimir Putin was head of state and the period when I’ve been head of state), then I’m absolutely not ruling anything out for myself, including participating in this election.” Similar comments have usually been hedged by at least a mention that the issue would be resolved jointly with the prime minister.

In addition, Medvedev said that several criteria would have to be fulfilled in order for him to run at all. “First of all, as a minimum, the results of my work must be acceptable to our citizens,” he said. “And also, our efforts must be directed towards achieving a result, and not just participating [in the election]. So, we’ll see.”

With that last statement, Medvedev seems to be putting emphasis not only on the idea that he still may run, but that if he does, it’s not going to be just for show. All that’s certain for now, however, is that experts will continue debating whether or not he really means it.