(title stolen from Twitter)
The situation with Matviyenko’s “election” in the municipal elections in St. Petersburg is, of course, extremely unpleasant. It’s unpleasant when your country is humiliated by fraud of some crude, almost African variety. And this is happening not in Chechnya or Dagestan, but in St. Petersburg, a city where, by long tradition, even fraud is supposed to be dressed up with certain formalities and phrases like, "dear sir... might we ask you to step down from our curb" (“porebrik” is the St. Petersburg word for curb). Here, there were no formalities: people only learned about the elections after they had already been called; the election commission posted the notice about scheduling the election on its website retroactively; no one (except the preselected participants in the scam) had any opportunity to register as a candidate; no one could appoint their own observers; the layout of polling stations was changed; a special court hearing with a predetermined outcome was arranged in order to deprive interested parties of the chance to challenge what was happening in court; the voting was organized using cadets assigned to the polling station from the Mozhaysky Military Space Academy; and so on and so forth. But even with all that, media observers were removed before the vote count because they were supposedly “interfering with voters.” In the end, V.I. Matviyenko “won” the election with either 95% or 97%. As @KermlinRussia brilliantly put it: Election commission workers are like gasoline buyers. 78 and even 92 no longer satisfy them. They prefer 95 and 98. Unpleasant, yes. But let’s look at it from another angle. The good thing about Matviyenko’s miracle victory and her subsequent appointment as chair of the Federation Council is that it is a real and significant step toward the delegitimization of the authorities. People talk about this a lot. For example: PUTIN IS ILLEGITIMATE. That’s not quite true. Putin was, at least once, elected in a relatively fair election. Putin enjoys genuine support from a large part of the population, and so on. You may dislike Putin. You may justifiably call him corrupt. You may justifiably call him a liar. You may justifiably call him incompetent and a bad official. But you cannot say of Putin that he is a complete nobody with absolutely no right to sit in his office. Matviyenko, on the other hand, as a result of this election has officially turned into a corrupt, incompetent, brainless nonentity. She has no right whatsoever to power or to an office in the Federation Council. Revolutionary sailors of any political persuasion have every moral right to drag Matviyenko out by her mink collar and send her where she truly belongs—to a pretrial detention center. And then no one will be able to say: ah, but that’s so unconstitutional! The actions of revolutionary sailors would be an order of magnitude more legitimate than the actions of the crooks in the election commission who secretly organized the election and posted information about it retroactively. The authorities, in the person of Matviyenko (and formally she will become the third-highest official in the state), will completely lose the right to call themselves authorities. And everyone will understand that. Of course, nothing all that terrible will happen. The sky will not fall to earth. They’ll give her a car with a blue flashing light. Her dear son will grab even more money with mommy’s help. But the fact of the Federation Council speaker’s complete loss of legitimacy will, sooner or later, play its role. What else is extremely important in this story? A practical demonstration of the decline in real support for the Party of Crooks and Thieves in the cities. Just look: ***in an election microscopic in scale, the mayor of Russia’s second-largest city is running with the full, unconditional, and public support of Putin, Medvedev, and United Russia. There’s money to burn. Unlimited television coverage. What more could anyone possibly need for a convincing victory over any candidate? And still they’re afraid. Just in case something goes wrong. A photo with Putin no longer works as a guarantee of popular love. And a photo with the United Russia logo already works against a candidate (in big cities). This openly demonstrated lack of confidence among the Kremlin crooks in their own popularity is yet another excellent reason why we should launch a broad campaign around the slogan: United Russia is the party of crooks and thieves. Vote for any party except United Russia. They fear this campaign, which means we absolutely must carry it out. And of course the greedy, grasping, brainless Matviyenko, together with her billionaire son, who earns money while barely conscious from heroin, should become the central point of campaigning against the Party of Crooks and Thieves in St. Petersburg in the upcoming elections. That spit in the face that Petersburgers received this Sunday will become an excellent emotional catalyst for the campaign. By the way, very tellingly, our Valentina Ivanovna stayed true to herself and even on her last day in office could not forget the interests of her family: today’s Kommersant has an article on the subject:
The Alla Pugacheva Song Theater company received 2.7 hectares (about 6.7 acres) of land on Vasilyevsky Island in St. Petersburg without a tender, for the construction of a $250 million cultural and business center. A hotel and business center are also planned for the site. ... Valentina Matviyenko signed the decree allocating the plot for this “designated purpose” at the very last moment before stepping down early as governor. ... The co-owners of LLC Alla Pugacheva Song Theater, besides the singer and her daughter Kristina Orbakaite (who each hold 17%), are longtime partners of the city authorities—22% stakes in the project belong to PMI promoter company head Yevgeny Finkelshtein, as well as to Maxim Vorobyov, chairman of the board of the Russian Sea fish-processing holding company (the brother of Andrei Vorobyov, head of the central executive committee of the United Russia party), and his partner Mikhail Kenin. Notably, alongside this project, a sports complex for the Academy of Martial Arts is also being developed by the league “Mix Fight. M-1 No-Rules Championships,” created by the governor’s son Sergei Matviyenko and Vadim, the brother of Yevgeny Finkelshtein. The plot for that project was allocated for survey work in 2008 at the same government session that approved the plot for the Pugacheva Song Theater. In addition, Sergei Matviyenko, as well as Messrs. Vorobyov and Kenin, are minority shareholders in Bank Saint Petersburg, where Mr. Matviyenko until recently served as vice president. Update: from 0:28 onward, they describe quite accurately what these elections are for
