HTML clipboardAgence France-Presse . Moscow

Dmitry Medvedev won a landslide victory in Russia’s presidential election to replace Vladimir Putin, officials said Monday, but accusations of rigging overshadowed the result.

Near complete results gave Medvedev 70.2 per cent of Sunday’s vote, crushing his nearest of three rivals, Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov, who won 17.8 per cent, the central elections commission said.

Allegations that the landslide was stage-managed by the Kremlin raised questions at home and internationally over the legitimacy of the election. Russia’s ‘democratic potential’ was unfulfilled in the presidential election won by Vladimir Putin’s successor Dmitry Medvedev, the head of the sole Western observer mission said Monday.

‘The results of the presidential election are a reflection of the will of an electorate whose democratic potential was unfortunately not tapped,’ said Andreas Gross, from the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe.

However, with Putin set to remain in power as prime minister under Medvedev, the biggest question was to what extent the new president will be in charge. At first glance, victory appeared to transform Medvedev, a soft-spoken bureaucrat who has never held elected office.

Russia’s mighty state-run television networks have for weeks painted Medvedev as Putin’s anointed successor, a president-in-waiting who not only says the same things as Putin, but dresses and talks like him. At a celebratory rock concert on Red Square, Medvedev, almost for the first time, looked like his own man. Where Putin, 55, was dressed in his usual black rain mack, the 42-year-old Medvedev came wearing a leather jacket and jeans and seemed to be brimming with confidence. The choreography stressed not only the change of power, but shift in generation.

Medvedev will be the youngest Kremlin leader since Tsar Nicholas II and the first after the Bolshevik Revolution not to have risen to power through the Communist Party or, like Putin, the KGB. Whether his apparent self-assurance is real, or whether Medvedev will be a Putin puppet, is now the billion-ruble question hanging over the world’s leading energy exporter and biggest country.

‘The most interesting time will be during the spring,’ said Alexei Malashenko, an analyst with the Carnegie Moscow Centre. ‘I have the impression that he is more independent than he appeared at first.’ At a post-polls press conference, the visibly relaxed Medvedev promised ‘joint work’ with Putin, who is stepping down after eight years in the Kremlin. But he stressed that the presidency was not about to be weakened.

The powers of the presidency and premiership ‘flow from the constitution and existing legislation and no one proposes to change them,’ he said. Underlining that foreign policy is ‘determined by the president,’ Medvedev laid claim to one of Putin’s main responsibilities during two terms where he has globe-trotted to restore Russian geopolitical power.

On the other hand, the specific mentioning of foreign policy appeared to suggest that Putin will dominate matters at home. The Medvedev-Putin relationship is a political balancing act likely to remain in the air for some time to come. ‘Medvedev’s task will be to prevent the bureaucracy from viewing Putin as a man on the way out.

Putin’s will be to avoid allowing a situation where Medvedev is seen as a puppet,’ the Russian newspaper Vedomosti said. How the West and Russia’s beleaguered opposition forces see Medvedev is the other unknown. Both the Communist Party and independent vote-monitoring organisation Golos alleged large-scale violations on Sunday.

Objections voiced by several European newspapers suggested that Western government reaction to the vote might also be critical. The Financial Times Deutschland said it would be ‘an insult to democracy’ to speak of a democratic election, while Italy’s La Stampa referred to ‘a democracy that many consider mutilated, even destroyed.’

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