Russian Presidential "Election" - March 2, 2008

[Colin]

Actually as for creating a stable authoritarian system this might be rather sound. Unlike Mexico's old system, which many considered to be the "perfect" one-party state, this allows for even more of an aura of competition but yet you still have the one-party aspect in place. This creating a faux dicotomy of policies has an intriguing effect from a political prospective and creating this "competitive" aspect within the United Russia one-party state may lead to a new Mexican system.

[Colin]

The elections in Russia are, for all intents and purposes, rigged to favour Putin loyalists and Putin's political party. No there will not be any upsets, Dmitri Medvedev will win with probably somewhere between 65 and 75 percent of the vote.

[Colin]

OMG!

Medvedev 69%
Zyuganov 17%
Zhirinovsky 14%

Maybe Putin didn't like the idea of his golden child getting a larger percentage of the vote than him. So he's messaging the poll numbers a bit.

[Colin]

And since the middle word spells "protokolov", I would assume it's polling stations reported.

I'd love to learn Russian.

I'd suggest it, great language I thoroughly enjoy it.

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The far left is Andrei Bogdanov, the centre-left is Zhirinovsky, the centre-right is Zyuganov, and the far right is Medvedev.

Bogdanov is from a small "liberal" party that won about a half of a precent in the last legislative elections. He was supposedly running as the liberal candidate but I have heard that he is actually promoted and funded by the Kremlin.