Anger at Sochi poll

The circus has left town, the tamed lions have slunk away with their tails between their legs and the world carried on with United Russia's man safely back in office. After all the fanfares, Sochi's mayoral election was something of a damp squib.
With Anatoly Pakhomov bagging 77 per cent of the vote, and opposition candidate Boris Nemtsov languishing on barely 13 per cent, his mandate looks comparatively secure, irrespective of any questions about the poll's legitimacy.
But political analyst Nikolai Petrov, an expert in regional elections at the Carnegie Moscow Centre, does not expect the newly-elected mayor to wield much influence for long.
"The Sochi mayoral position is a very hot seat," he said. "There is a big conflict between the federal, regional and municipal authorities. Pakhomov is the fourth mayor in the last year, and I'll be surprised if he survives until the Olympics."
The theory is simply that the Kremlin regards Sochi, host of the 2014 Winter Olympics and centre of a colossal redevelopment programme ahead of that event, as far too important to be left under the influence of a local politician who has any kind of profile.
That also explains why the campaign attracted more attention around the world than it did in Sochi itself, where campaigning was mostly limited to state-run TV criticism of Pakhomov's opponents. Nemtsov of Solidarity and Yury Dzagania of the Communist Party complained that they were denied the opportunity to speak in public and had their campaign posters torn down.
Meanwhile Pakhomov himself kept a low profile, though still had a chance to embarrass himself when his worthy but dull speech to the local Armenian community was spectacularly upstaged by Nemtsov supporter Garry Kasparov. The former chess champion, an ethnic Armenian, took the stage to decry Moscow's machinations, leaving Pakhomov stranded on the platform as the crowd roared for more.
According to Petrov, the low-key campaign was also part of the authorities' plan to control the polls.
"The strategy was not to give it a lot of publicity in the town, not to attract attention and to make the campaign invisible," he said. "That was for understandable reasons. The party of power, and the Communists, are both interested in low turn-outs. It makes the results look better for them."
Petrov characterised the elections as "more or less free, but not fair", acknowledging that early polling had cast a doubt over the validity of the result. Exit polls by opposition candidates on Sunday's official polling day suggested a tight contest with Pakhomov unable to secure the 50 per cent he needed to win without a run-off, but those figures do not include returns from the 30,000 or so ballots cast early.
However, he was less interested in a further claim made by opposition candidates, that allowing Abkhaz citizens with Russian passports to vote had affected the outcome. "It seems pretty strange to let them vote, but the reported number of voters was rather small," Petrov said.
Nemtsov and Dzagania are both expected to launch a legal challenge. Dzagania, who polled 6.5 per cent, protested that he was unable to campaign properly, while Nemtsov claimed the early polls tilted the vote in favour of Pakhomov.
"We know that many of those who cast ballots in early voting did it under duress, pressure and threats," said Nemtsov.
"They were threatened that they could be sacked or would not be paid their salaries."