Why the Russians still love an authoritarian leader

Vladimir Putin came under a hail of fire abroad this week for rigging the weekend's parliamentary elections.

Putin's party, United Russia, obtained 64.1% of the vote, securing 315 seats in the 450-seat Duma, 14 seats more than the two-thirds majority needed to pass constitutional amendments.

While Putin says the election showed that Russia was maturing as a democracy, Western commentators, including the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe most of whose monitors were barred from observing Sunday's poll plus the Council of Europe, were fiercely critical. The German government took the unprecedented step of declaring that Russia was not a democracy'.

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Even after years of increasingly centralised authority, the vote was a "throwback", says The Washington Post. Backed by the Kremlin, United Russia, "Putin's personal political vehicle, rode roughshod over its divided and disorganised rivals". The campaign was conducted with "brass-knuckled disregard" for his opponents and was followed by reports of "fraud, abuse, multiple ballots and other irregularities".

Why is Putin so insecure? asked Pierre Brianon on Breaking views. Whatever party he chose to lead would easily have won. One can only assume he "loaded the dice out of habit", says The Daily Telegraph. The "immensely popular leader" has brought order out of the chaos of the Yeltsin era and injected "frequently menacing swagger into Russia's international posture".

There aren't even any forces in the country powerful enough to threaten Putin, says The Guardian. Opposition is weak and divided and its constituency "does not stretch far outside the urban middle classes". What is obvious is that the leadership "does not trust society to use democracy without harming itself: the child is judged to lack the maturity to handle such a complicated toy without supervision".

One view is that the elections were manipulated because Putin needed a landslide to gain the mandate to force a constitutional amendment that would give power to the winning party leader, while the presidential post becomes largely ceremonial. He may even discover' a loophole that allows him to stand in the presidential elections next March: at present, he is forbidden from doing so.

One way or another, Putin will stay in power next year, says The Guardian. Despite the rigging, this election showed that Russia wants Putin and his brand of "authoritarian, paternalistic" leadership. "No amount of Western wailing is going to change that for now." The question is whether he tackles Russia's social and economic problems: "Oil revenues squandered through corruption, underinvestment in an industrial infrastructure that is crumbling, mounting inflation, the gap between rich and poor, the inability of large numbers on average wages to cope with the rising cost of living".

Establishing public confidence in all layers of government and creating strong independent institutions are formidable and urgent tasks. Russia has already made great progress under Putin, says Norman Stone in The Times. It is, in parts, booming, and not just because of oil prices. It is making things. More generally, Russians feel that "at last someone is standing up for them". The West may see him as a "pain in the neck", but if Russians see him as their best hope, "they should be understood".