Western leaders denounce Putin's 'illegal' election win as allies send congratulations
Visit our website:
http://www.france24.com
Like us on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/FRANCE24.English
Follow us on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/France24_en
Transcript
00:00 We can now bring in our former Moscow correspondent, Nick Holdsworth.
00:04 Nick, good afternoon.
00:05 The final results have come in.
00:08 Vladimir Putin clinching nearly 90 percent of the vote.
00:12 What do we make of that?
00:14 This seems to be a reflection of the anxiety that we've seen in the Kremlin in recent weeks
00:21 about opposition figures who had no hope of winning the presidential election.
00:26 There are a couple of opposition figures who had taken off the ballot well before this
00:30 three-day vote.
00:31 This three-day vote was also unprecedented.
00:35 This was designed to help people vote in the occupied territories of eastern Ukraine and
00:40 also to extend the time period that people had available to vote for President Putin.
00:46 About a billion pounds or euros was spent on electioneering by the Kremlin.
00:53 There were massive placards everywhere.
00:56 There was TV coverage, Internet coverage.
01:00 It seems that in the past if Vladimir Putin was satisfied with 65 or 67 percent of the
01:06 vote, now nothing less than nearly 90 percent would do.
01:09 The official figure according to the Kremlin today is 87.28 percent on a historic turnout
01:16 of nearly 78 percent.
01:18 Now we have to take these results with a large handful of salt.
01:24 Russia under Putin has a history of not conducting free and fair elections.
01:30 There were no free independent international observers at this election.
01:35 The Kremlin says there were foreign observers, but they weren't from the OSCE, which is the
01:39 organization which normally would be observing such elections.
01:43 And there were multiple incidents of people telling reporters that they'd had ballots
01:48 taken off them or the police peering over their shoulders as they voted.
01:53 It does not seem like it is a free and fair election.
01:56 And if you look at the international reaction, it's all Russia's somewhat shady friends who
02:02 have welcomed this vote, President of Venezuela, for example, the Chinese president, of course,
02:07 because they're trying to keep Russia under their control, if you like.
02:12 And in the West, it's been condemned as neither free nor fair.
02:16 Nick, something interesting we have coming into us is how Russians voted overseas.
02:22 This is Russians living in places like the U.K., which came in at 6 percent for Vladimir
02:27 Putin, for France and Spain, 11 percent.
02:30 That's drastically low compared to this 90 percent which he's secured now.
02:36 What does this tell you about the state of Russia's opposition?
02:39 Is it going to be overseas, considering that there is virtually none at home?
02:46 Two immediate responses to this.
02:48 Obviously, many of those people voting overseas are people who fled Russia in the last couple
02:52 of years, people who are definitely not pro-Putin.
02:55 So it's not surprising that we've seen much lower levels of support for Putin in those
03:01 overseas elections.
03:02 It's also less easy for the Russian authorities to fiddle those elections, as they have probably
03:08 done in Russia in the last few days.
03:11 It also is reflective of the fact that, yes, the Russian opposition now really has no option
03:17 but to operate from overseas.
03:19 As we saw yesterday in Berlin, Alexei Navalny's widow, Julia Navalny, was there with about
03:25 2,000 people outside the Russian embassy.
03:28 They were going to vote.
03:29 I expect very few of those voted for Putin.
03:31 Of course, some people will still vote for him.
03:33 But what I could say is that the 87.28 percent who the Kremlin claims have voted for Putin
03:40 over the weekend, we can probably knock a fair few percentage points off that to get
03:45 down to a real figure.
03:46 But nevertheless, it's unlikely that Putin would have lost, even if the election were
03:52 free and fair, given the state-managed support that he's drummed up over the last quarter
03:57 of a century.
03:58 Interestingly, Vladimir Putin did say that Alexei Navalny's wife has lost her ties to
04:06 the motherland.
04:07 Nick, we're going to leave it there.
04:08 Thank you very much for that.
04:09 Nick Holtzworth there.