: I forbid you to watch

The Central Election Commission again does not like the criticism of European observers. The clash of two positions - the invariably critical European one and the equally invariably “sovereign elective” CEC always shows that the CEC does not want to do anything to control the elections. And the citizens do not demand this from him.

Elections are coming and the Central Election Commission again begins to complain about European observers. Today it became known that the Central Election Commission appealed to the Prosecutor General's Office and the Russian Foreign Ministry with complaints about PACE observers. The CEC suspects a group of five representatives of the parliamentary assembly of violating Russian legislation, said CEC Chairman Vladimir Churov.

“As for the PACE mission, we are now studying their activities. Here, during the arrival of the so-called five. There are signs of violation of the legislation of the Russian Federation. We contacted the Prosecutor General’s Office and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs with the corresponding letters,” Churov said. Churov also said that observers from PACE are not yet accredited, unlike 20 observers from the Office of Human Rights (ODIHR) and 40 people from the CIS mission.

The PACE members may well have disliked the Central Election Commission because even without accreditation they began to criticize the Russian election realities. In particular, the fact that the campaigning of the Moscow City Election Commission and United Russia is almost identical. “I think it shouldn’t be this way. Campaigning by the state, the Central Election Commission for participation in the vote is one thing, and election posters of United Russia are a completely different matter,” Marietta de Pourbaix-Lendin, a member of the PACE observer mission, said last week.

The nuance, however, is that the PACE delegation is not observers at all. PACE also promises to send 40 observers to the actual elections. And in this case, the campaign was criticized by a member of the five-member Parliamentary Assembly delegation who visited Russia on a three-day fact-finding visit in early November. At the invitation of State Duma Speaker Boris Gryzlov.

The visit somehow “didn’t seem right away” to Vladimir Churov. Let's say, during the three days the Europeans stayed in Moscow, he never found time to meet with them. Translated from political language into Russian, this means that the head of the Central Election Commission, in the midst of the election campaign, pointedly ignored European observers.

Disputes between the Central Election Commission and observers from abroad have long become a common occurrence during elections. The CEC accuses PACE and ODIHR observers of partiality and a desire to interfere in Russia's internal affairs. And he demands not to discuss the process of inaction of the Central Election Commission itself, but only the election procedure itself. Which, according to the Central Election Commission, is very, very good.

In fact, European observers have never been particularly concerned with the organization of elections. On the contrary, in the last elections to the State Duma, the only positive point that observers pointed out in their reports was precisely the technical organization of the election process. As for the rest - in the observance of competition during the pre-election period, first of all - observers from Europe saw the dominance of United Russia and Vladimir Putin. And they stated that the elections were far from European standards.

This truism of the Central Election Commission is very annoying and the agency is trying in every possible way to complicate the life of observers, at least psychologically.

The election commission operates according to the well-known principle “no one is allowed to criticize us.” Observers from the ODIHR were not allowed to attend the last Duma elections at all.

In addition, the CEC contrasts the opinion of European observers with the opinion of observers from the CIS. They traditionally do not notice irregularities in elections, considering the process, if not exemplary, then quite close to ideal.

No matter how unfair the reproaches of European observers may be, only a person very sympathetic to the Russian authorities and the Central Election Commission can say that there are no violations in the Russian elections. It is difficult to explain, based on empirical knowledge, the “level of voter support” that United Russia demonstrated in almost all the Caucasian republics in the 2007 elections. Or explain by “coincidence” the unity of the campaigning of the Moscow United Russia, the Moscow City Election Commission and the social advertising of the Moscow government (the mayor of the capital, however, elegantly explained the similarity of slogans by the unity of goals). Anyone who knows how to add two and two will see an artificial character in this kind of anomaly.

However, the Central Election Commission does not see anything anomalous here, as in dozens of other cases. And he states every time that “individual violations” did not affect the result of the vote as a whole.

It is clear, however, that no European observers should really teach Russians about democracy and how to elect parliament. There must be a civil demand for fair elections, which must be suffered, clearly formulated and supported by a mass movement. As long as citizens' demand for fair elections is in sixteenth place in the system of priorities, no European observers will help.