Russia bars liberal candidate from presidential election

Veteran liberal politician Grigory Yavlinsky, who's been a presidential candidate three times before, will not be allowed to run against Vladimir Putin in the upcoming March 4 presidential polls, Russia's official electoral commission announced today.

 The decision will not only prevent Mr. Yavlinsky from campaigning or addressing the electorate over the next five weeks, but also denies his party, Yabloko – Russia's oldest grassroots liberal party – from fielding election observers to monitor the voting.

 Kremlin critics are in an uproar over the ruling, saying it proves that the Putin system of "managed democracy," which weeds and landscapes Russia's political garden to ensure no viable independent challengers to the Kremlin's chosen candidates can emerge, is still alive and well.

 "The Putin strategy is to win the election decisively in the first round, and the presence of Yavlinsky on the ballot would have complicated things," says Sergei Strokan, a columnist with the Moscow business daily Kommersant.

"In the past, Yavlinsky could be relied on to get a limited and predictable portion of the vote from urban, middle class intellectuals, and that was OK with the Kremlin," he says. "But since the mass demonstrations in December, everything's changed. Unlike others on the ballot, Yavlinsky could be an acceptable protest candidate for millions of people who are tired of Putin. He could catch a protest wave that would possibly prevent Putin from winning a first round knockout. So, they decided he had to be excluded."

Election official Nikolai Konkin, who announced the ruling today, insisted that it was purely a matter of technical propriety. Yavlinsky's supporters collected well over the two million signatures needed on nomination petitions in the 25 days allotted, but upon examination, officials found about a quarter of them to be invalid, Mr. Konkin said.

Yabloko's press spokesperson, Igor Yakovlev, says the party collected the necessary number of signatures despite the short time frame and harassment from local authorities. He says that disqualification of signatures is one of the standard methods from the "managed democracy" toolbox for keeping genuine challengers off the ballot.

"The decision not to register Yavlinsky is purely political, and we believe it was taken by Putin himself," says Mr. Yakovlev. "That's the way the system works. But if Yavlinsky is off the ballot, it means these presidential election lose whatever was left of their legitimacy."

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