Around 120,000 people on Saturday attended a rally to protest against the alleged rigging of parliamentary polls in a new challenge to Russian strongman Vladimir Putin’s authority, organisers said, as a protest leader vowed to bring one million out on the streets for the next demonstration.
“120,000 people have come,” Russian politician Vladimir Ryzhkov who organised the protest, said. “Next time, we will bring one million people onto the streets of Moscow,” blogger Alexei Navalny, who has emerged as a figurehead of the protest movement, said in a speech. Clutching white balloons and banners with the slogan “For Free Elections”, the protestors thronged Sakharov Avenue in Moscow, symbolically named after the Nobel-winning dissdent Andrei Sakharov who for years defied the USSR.
Incensed by claims of wholesale violations in the polls that handed a reduced majority to Putin’s United Russia, tens of thousands of people already took to the streets across Russia on December 10. These protests are the biggest show of public anger in Russia since the chaotic 1990s and the first sign of a growing challenge to Putin’s 12-year domination of the country. The protests have put pressure on Putin to implement radical changes in Russia’s tightly-controlled political system as he plans to return to the presidency in March elections after his four year stint as prime minister.
Former Russian finance minister Alexei Kudrin for the first time joined the opposition protest in Moscow and called for new elections to replace this month’s disputed polls. “We need to have early elections, adopt new laws about elections, and register those parties that were not registered,” Kudrin, who held his post for over a decade before falling out with the Kremlin this year, told the Interfax news agency. In an unexpected boost to the protestors, an advisory Kremlin rights panel said in a statement that the new parliament had been discredited by the accusations of fraud and fresh elections should be called.
“This discredits the electoral system and the lower house of parliament and… creates a real threat to the Russian state,” it said in a statement, calling for the resignation of election commission chief Vladimir Churov. It said that new election laws should be put in place “with the aim of then calling snap elections” to replace the current parliament.
Tens of thousands protest against Putin
