After Big Protests, Russians Vote for President
02 March 2012
Russian election officials hold an election poster showing the candidates.
This is IN THE NEWS in VOA Special English.
Russians vote for a new president Sunday, and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is expected to win. There are five candidates on the ballot. The others include Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov and billionaire businessman Sergei Prokhorov.
Mr. Putin was president from two thousand to two thousand eight. By law, Russian presidents cannot serve more than two terms in a row.
There were reports of widespread cheating in the elections for parliament, the Duma, last year. Those claims led to the largest street demonstrations in the country since the Soviet Union collapsed twenty years ago. Protesters say Mr. Putin controls Russia through a heavily controlled political system and corruption.
Angela Stent is a Russia expert at Georgetown University in Washington. She was not surprised that the Prime Minister has blamed the United States in connection with the unrest.
ANGELA STENT: “He has really resorted to a tactic that, of course, has been used since he became president in two thousand -- and that is to invoke the United States [as the] enemy, to blame the United States for a lot of Russian problems. And as you saw, in the Duma elections, he then blamed Hillary Clinton, Secretary Clinton, for supporting the opposition and for trying to undermine Russian stability.”
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