MOSCOW — Vladimir Putin appears all but certain to return to the Kremlin in today’s Russian presidential election, but he’ll find himself in charge of a country far more willing to challenge him.
An unprecedented wave of massive protests showed a substantial portion of the population was fed up with the political entrenchment engineered by Putin since he first became president in 2000, and police are preparing for the possibility of post-election unrest in Moscow.
The Putin system of so-called managed democracy put liberal opposition forces under consistent pressure, allowing them only rare permission to hold small rallies and bringing squads of police to harshly break up any unauthorized gathering.
The Kremlin gained control of all major television channels, and their news reports turned into uncritical recitations of Putin’s programs, often augmented with admiring footage of him riding horseback, scuba-diving or petting wild animals.
But the protests, sparked by allegations of widespread fraud in December’s parliamentary elections, forced notable changes.
Authorities gave permission, however grudgingly, for opposition rallies that attracted vast crowds, upward of 50,000 in Moscow. State television gave them substantial and mostly neutral coverage.
Whether that tolerance will last after the election is unclear. According to the most recent survey by the independent Levada Center polling agency, Putin is on track to win the election with about two-thirds of the vote against four challengers — enough to bolster his irritable denunciations of the protesters as a small, coddled minority.
“People in Russia are not going to recognize Putin’s victory in the first round,” Alexei Navalny, one of the loosely knit opposition’s most charismatic figures, declared last week.
Whether today’s vote is seen as honest is likely to be key. A count without reports of wide violations could deprive protesters of a galvanizing issue.
