(EDM) No surprises happened in Russia on Sunday, March 18, in the carefully orchestrated voting procedure generously described by the media as a “presidential elections.” But many questions loom over the beginning of the new term that Vladimir Putin claimed. His “campaigning” gained some momentum in the last couple of weeks, but it remained short on message and profoundly boring, projecting primarily the maxim that there could not possibly be any alternative to the 65-year-old leader. Profound effort was directed toward ensuring high participation in the voting, so that the proposition to boycott the show, advanced by Alexei Navalny, an opposition leader who was denied the chance to be on the ballot, would be defeated (Kommersant, March 16). Navalny will now have to reconsider his political strategy, but he hardly has a shortage of targets when it comes to attacking the ruling elite, which has failed to gain any new legitimacy in this manipulated and falsified pseudo-democratic process (Novaya Gazeta, March 15). […]
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