The Russian Front

Russian Vote: Where Venezuela's Hugo Chavez failed, Vladimir Putin succeeded. With Sunday's election he has gained unprecedented authority, and it will come at the expense of freedom.

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A leader who refuses to yield power is dangerous, even if he is popular, as Putin seemingly is in Russia. There's a reason the U.S. changed its Constitution to limit presidents to two terms. It's healthy to institutionalize peaceful change. Sometimes voters simply don't know they need another choice until it's too late.

In Russia, the voters should have known it was too late years ago. Putin, who said he would not run for a third term, has been dismantling democratic institutions and consolidating power for years.

One of the most egregious examples has been the snuffing out of opposition political parties through registration laws. Parties now must have 50,000 members, a 400% increase beyond the previous benchmark, and gather 200,000 signatures to run.

The 11 parties that remained for Sunday's election for the lawmaking 450-seat Duma body could not stand up to Putin's United Russia party. A change in law that requires parties to take at least 7% of the national vote to gain seats — the previous threshold was 5%, the standard in many traditional multiparty nations — virtually shut out all but Putin's party and the Communist party.

The official tally indicates Putin's party took more than 64%, but who knows what the real total is? Votes were counted not by the Central Electoral Commission, which, though pro-Putin, was apparently not pro enough.

The task was actually handed over to the "special working group," insiders who are exclusively "members of the United Russia party," as the Cato Institute's Andrei Illarionov, a former top economic adviser to Putin, has pointed out.

Given the events leading up to election, there's reason to believe the true vote was closer.

But the election was fixed long before the counters sifted through the ballots. Besides making it nearly impossible for opponents to mount a challenge at the polls, Putin engaged in a systematic intimidation and elimination of dissent on the streets.

As recently as the weekend before the election the government was still putting a chill on the process. On Nov. 25, riot police detained two potential presidential candidates in St. Petersburg; more than 200 other opposition protesters were held as well.

A day earlier, former world chess champion Garry Kasparov, a harsh critic of Putin, was arrested during a protest in Moscow and sentenced to five days in jail.

"Millions of copies of literature from opposition parties have been confiscated and destroyed," Illarionov noted. "There was a massive campaign to harass, beat and terrorize members of the political opposition."

For Kasparov and the other victims of the crackdown, the experience is surely a painful reminder of the rigged Soviet elections they thought were left behind after the Soviet Union fell.

These are not conditions conducive to the spread of freedom. Neither is the self-perpetuation of a regime that refuses to walk away when its time is over. Those capable of flouting foundational law will have no trouble rolling back liberty when it suits them.

The effects of Putin's political power grab go beyond Russia. It will further strain Washington-Moscow relations, which have deteriorated through the years as Putin has grown more belligerent and unnecessarily nationalistic.

Ultimately, though, Putin is Europe's problem. The leaders of Great Britain, France and Germany need to muster the courage to pressure Putin to step away from his ambitions. If not, a lethal poison inevitably will leak West.