MOSCOW—Western election monitors said Monday that a Russian parliamentary vote this weekend was neither free nor fair, and tipped lopsidedly in favor of the pro-Kremlin party that nevertheless was dealt a humiliating setback.

The observers' comments suggest the Kremlin could have done even worse in a fair contest, highlighting the drop in popularity that Mr. Putin faces as he plans an official return to the Kremlin in March. With discontent rising within Russia, Mr. Putin appears likely to clamp down on opposition and step up anti-Western rhetoric, which in the past has been effective in rallying support for the Kremlin, observers say.

Two Western monitors described the voting irregularities in harsh terms Monday, saying that although election day was itself peaceful, it was marred by apparent manipulations and "serious indications of ballot box stuffing."

"To me, this election was like a game in which only some players are allowed to compete," said Heidi Tagliavini, who headed the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe's monitoring mission in Russia, at a news conference. "And the game was tilted in favor of one of the players."

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the U.S. has "serious concerns" about the vote, and that Washington was also alarmed that internal Russian election monitors were harassed, including by cyberattacks on their websites.

In Germany, Germany's Russia-policy coordinator Andreas Schockenhoff, said the Russian leadership missed an opportunity partnership with its own society, adding the reports of election manipulation "threaten to deepen the estrangement between the Russian government and the Russian people." France likewise urged Moscow to investigate the election violations cited by the OSCE.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said the weakness of the pro-Kremlin party in official results was evidence that manipulations were minimal. Kremlin leaders were claiming a victory one day after the vote, although the pro-Kremlin party, United Russia, will lose large number of seats in parliament and is barely clinging to a majority.

The official tally showed United Russia was leading with 49.5% of the vote, with about 96% of precincts counted, according to Central Election Commission chief Vladimir Churov. He said United Russia it will get 238 of the Duma's 450 seats, a sharp drop compared with the previous vote that granted it a two-thirds majority in the State Duma, allowing it to change the constitution.

But details of the vote suggest Mr. Putin's support base has narrowed to a shrinking minority within Russia, many of them dependent on government patronage or business. Kremlin opposition, fed by an active blogosphere that documented many of the voting violations Sunday, has mushroomed into a large but amorphous national movement.

In Moscow, security remained tight one day after the vote, with police trucks parked along a main thoroughfare. Thousands of pro-Kremlin youth were bused into the city center for a rally that leaders said was meant to neutralize antigovernment demonstrations.

Several thousand people protested in central Moscow against what they said was alleged fraud in the parliamentary election, one of the biggest opposition demonstrations in Russia in years.

Pollsters, party officials and analysts said United Russia appears to be suffering from growing popular resentment of its monopoly over political life. The announcement in September that Mr. Medvedev would step down from the presidency after only one term to make way for Mr. Putin fueled discontent.

"The switch played out as a negative," according to Alexander Shokhin, head of Russia's largest business association. "People wanted the decision to be made in a different way."

A poll last month, for example, found that more than one-third of Russians agreed with the opposition's characterization of United Russia as "the party of crooks and thieves."

The Kremlin's continued reliance on its usual tools—saturation television coverage and promises of government largess—also seems to have backfired as more Russians turned to the largely unregulated Internet where they found reports of widespread vote manipulation, often with video to back them up.

Those reports became such a factor—despite hacker attacks that shut down many major sites—that Mr. Medvedev commented on them Monday, questioning the authenticity of some of the videos.

But even with the effect of the vote manipulation, United Russia's results were unexpectedly weak in a number of regions. The party lost outright to the communists in a number of major cities in Siberia. In Mr. Putin's voting district in downtown Moscow, it barely eked out a second-place finish with 23.7% of the vote, Interfax reported.

Mr. Putin's personal popularity remains higher than that of United Russia, according to numerous polls, but the March presidential elections could prove a test given Sunday's performance.

 

Write to Alan Cullison at alan.cullison@wsj.com and Gregory L. White at greg.white@wsj.com

 

 

The Wall Street Journal

DECEMBER 5, 2011, 1:53 P.M. ET