tiscali.cz: Předvolební kampaň na ruského prezidenta má první skandál: http://t.co/QasPJgmv

January 9, 2012 10:43 am via twitterfeedReplyRetweetFavorite

@Zpravy

Zpravy

“Preliminary campaign for Russian president has its first scandal.” Yes, it’s scandalous, if not quite entirely straightforward, as explained in the accompanying article about the discovery made by opposition activists in Moscow of the wholesale fabrication of signature-petitions being perpetrated in local universities.

Petitions for Putin? you might ask. Actually, no: petitions for one Dmitry Mezencev, currently governor of the Irkutsk region, in far-east Siberia, to enable him to get on the presidential ballot to oppose Putin. Now, how can that make sense? Simple: Russian law unfortunately decrees that no presidential election is valid unless there are at least two qualified candidates running for that office. That means that, even if the opposition could sponsor someone to oppose Putin, they could then turn around and use that candidate’s withdrawal from the race as a threat or weapon to invalidate the results.

So Putin needs some “insurance,” in the form of another candidate who can be called up in time to function as the required opponent. (Not to win, though, by any stretch of the imagination; and the piece assures us that Mezencev is a loyal Putin-man.) But you just can’t announce that you are running for Russian president, as many opposition figures have found out in the past to their cost – you have to be able to show two million valid signatures on petitions for your candidacy, if you are candidate not backed by any party represented in the Duma. Oh-so-many opposition presidential candidates have been dismissed from participation in past presidential elections for allegedly failing to meet this standard.

No time like the present, then, to start getting those petitions ready in case Mezencev needs to be called into action. The article describes how some investigators, including one female reporter from the one-remaining independent Russian radio station, Echo Moscow, easily uncovered petition-fabrication operations happening in lecture-halls of Moscow universities. They were so brazen that there were no guards or security of any kind (until later, when the occupants discovered who was visiting them) as not only students but also pensioners and anyone else in need of some extra money sat filling in names and official ID card numbers into the forms. Not signatures, mind you – that would have been illegal since of course the signatures would not be their own (although the other information was no more their own), but those can presumably be taken care of later, somewhere with a bit better security.

And of course those “visitors” have it on video, here, on something called “Rutube.” Don’t worry: I looked at it myself, it’s not a virus-site or anything like that, it’s just rather remarkable to see the cameraman walk through the lecture-hall where the people are all hard at work at electoral fraud, where he even raises a few of the bogus forms up to the camera-lens.

                          

Could this be a sign that the authorities have succeeded in quieting down the opposition and convincing the country to forget about that election, accept Ahmadinejad, and just go back to work? Probably not; Rezaei is identified in that Standaard article as the “conservative presidential candidate,” i.e. the one closest anyway to the current government establishment. Juan Cole implies that, in the true tally of the 12 June votes, he probably came in dead-last.

                          

And then there is the rent-a-spectator operation, revealed by Der Spiegel (China Puts On-Order Applauders in the Tribunes). It’s truly a bummer for anyone on that committee to have to gaze upon empty spaces in the spectator-stands at any of the athletic events they have spent so much time and effort organizing – and, more crucially, from which televised images might be broadcast back to anywhere else in the world (not to forget the rest of China). Ah, but always remember that bodies are extraordinarily easy to find -and then to manipulate – in a state with a population in excess of 1.3 billion and an authoritarian regime. So for many of the events that have taken place already it is clear that people (Chinese, of course) have been shipped in to give the impression of a full, raucous house. (I’ll call them rent-a-spectators here, and similar terms, although do understand that these people are volunteers, at least according to our old friend Wang Wei, the committee vice-chairman.)

How do we know about this? Quite simply because it is obvious: the Olympic authorities make no attempt to camouflage their rent-a-crowds, and indeed these are generally unmistakable in their identical yellow T-shirts. (It seems a special workers’ contingent was sent to cheer on the early field hockey matches, all wearing shirts – color not disclosed – with the English slogan “Cheering from Beijing Workers.”) Oh, and they really pour it on with the unbiased applause – meant for all sides in the competitions they are witnessing.

Why are these made-to-order spectators necessary in the first place, given the reports of widespread sell-outs among the Olympic events? Well, because just because someone has bought a ticket – or has otherwise attained it – doesn’t mean he intends to go use it. But each rent-a-spectator does have firm instructions about what to do if/when the person who has actually paid for the seat shows up: the stand-in is to take his yellow T-shirt and get lost, immediately. Still, the Olympic authorities are already trying to come up with ways to bolster what you could call “sincere” event attendance. It’s too late at this point to undo the tightening of visa standards that the Chinese government put through prior to the Games’ start – they had to keep out potential protestors or other subversives, you understand – and so far the concept of just throwing open the events to whoever wants to come, for free, is still beyond consideration. But it seems they do intend to try to get more tickets in the pipeline to travel agencies (for foreigners) and to local organizations (for native Chinese).

UPDATED: And now there is this. (English-language link from the BBC News site, until I can find a suitable non-English-language one.) Didn’t that sort of thing sink Milli Vanilli back in the 1990s?