Konstantin Sonin of the New Economic School in Moscow sent along the following in response to my request for comments on the 2012 Russian presidential election:
I wrote a piece for FREE Policy Brief, a joint project of a Swedish, Russian, Latvian, Ukrainian, and Polish think tanks, where detailed my election impressions – comments are welcome, but the bottom line is simple.
First, Putin’s actual share of the vote was about 50-55% [JT: as opposed to the official result of 64%], and his official Moscow share is 45%; this is a lot of legitimacy by democratic countries’ standards, but not quite high by the Russian ones. Except for Moscow, where tens of thousands of young observers prevented the most outrageous (and most effective) forms of electoral fraud – ballot stuffing and re-writing of polling protocols – vote fraud was ubiquitous. Rough estimates of the fraud (based on copies of official protocols that differ from those that appeared in the official tally) does not leave Putin any “comfortable zone” – it might well be that he got 47-49 percent of votes (though 53-55 is more likely), and thus a second round was needed. The size of military detachments from all over the country on Moscow streets is a sign that Putin is not unaware that he no longer has a solid majority.
Second, there is, for the first time in a decade, a popular liberal alternative to Putin, Mikhail Prokhorov, a billionaire with no political experience. Running as a pointedly anti-Putin candidate, yet enjoying access to TV, he convinced followers of diverse liberal movements to vote for him on March 4. His result is high (some would say, very high): the official tally is 8 percent in all Russia, 22 percent in Moscow; more credible estimates suggest that it might be as high as 12 percent in Russia. Prokhorov ran a decent campaign, and was the only politician of the “next generation”. He succeeded in getting all the “liberal opposition” vote without negotiating with the “old guard” of the liberal opposition, and certainly benefited from the absence of both old faces like Grigory Yavlinsky and new faces like Alexey Navalny on the ballot. (Disclosure: I was Prokhorov’s economic advisor during this campaign.)
Sonin’s full report is available here.