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MOSCOW – Seven hours after Leonid Volkov’s election night YouTube marathon, awakening viewers in Russia were asking who had won.
“We don’t know,” Volkov said with teary eyes. “This is what you call an unpredictable choice.”
Volkov is a great aide to Aleksei A. Navalny, the leader of the Russian opposition, and his all-night live broadcast on the American presidential election deviated from the typical Navalny team’s online chat about corrupt oligarchs and local officials. that trample on democratic principles.
In Russia, the protracted aftermath of Election Day in America has become the focus of an internal political struggle in its own right, fueling a debate over whether Russia’s strictly written political landscape has unique advantages over American democracy.
For defenders of President Vladimir V. Putin, President Trump’s false claims of widespread electoral fraud have emerged as perhaps the best proof yet that democracy is a recipe for disaster.
Putin’s opponents are fighting back with their own narrative: The sheer unpredictability and nuance of the chaos surrounding the world’s biggest elections underscore the greatness of a free system.
“Compare this to the most shameful ‘elections’ that Putin and his clique organized for us,” another opposition politician, Gennadi V. Gudkov, wrote on Twitter Thursday, “with a result drawn up in advance by the criminals of the Central Election Commission by order of the Kremlin!”
The stakes are high in how Russians interpret the American electoral process this year, and Putin’s allies know it. Pro-democracy activists in Russia and around the world have long worried that unrest in the West and Trump’s weakening of American institutions could discredit liberal ideals in their countries.
“All these things, Trump’s criticisms, de facto work to justify Russian authoritarianism,” said Aleksandr V. Kynev, a Russian political scientist. “Everything finds very fertile ground in Russia because we have great mistrust in our own elections.”
Russia is a democracy on paper, but Putin largely eliminated democratic freedoms early in his 20-year term. The country still holds elections, and opposition candidates are generally chosen by the authorities to provide a facade of election. Only in very rare cases do they win.
But many Russians are interested in how democracy can work and what a political battle really looks like, Volkov said, explaining why he held his marathon broadcast on YouTube. “For us,” he said, by way of contrast, “it is a great triumph when we manage to register a candidate.”
The Kremlin’s allies, however, saw this week’s election as an opportunity to present Western democracy as prone to chaos, in contrast to the stability offered by Putin.
Margarita Simonyan, editor of the state television network RT, posted on Twitter On Wednesday night the US elections were “neither free nor fair.” Vladimir Solovyov, a prominent talk show host, said The United States had “managed to strike a crushing blow against remaining confidence in the election procedure.”
Trump’s claims of election fraud allowed Kremlin allies, who are used to hearing accusations of fraudulent elections from pro-Western opponents, to basically turn the tables.
On Russian state television, anchors and analysts who commented on the US elections used the same terms that the Russian opposition routinely uses to describe faked elections at home. There was talk of “vbrosy” or ballot filling and the use of “administrative resources”, the common practice of rulers throughout the post-Soviet space of using government tools to win elections and hinder opponents.
“Even if Biden is declared the winner, Trump will have every reason and ability, including his notorious administrative resources, to plunge the Democrats into the mud in the most incredible way,” opined pro-Kremlin expert Aleksei A. Mukhin. the state-controlled Rossiya-24 news channel on Thursday.
The pattern of vote counting in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, with Trump taking the lead, followed by Biden’s rapid advances on absentee ballots, led Putin’s allies to echo accusations of vote accumulation that the opposition usually do. in Russia and Belarus.
Trump’s questioning of the integrity of the vote count – a ruling party lawmaker named Oleg V. Morozov thundered on a state television talk show Thursday – evoked recent turmoil in another post-Soviet country: Kyrgyzstan.
“We are seeing the Kyrgyzization of the American electoral system,” Morozov said. “The main pillar that the United States has always relied on has been called into question.”
The Kremlin said it would wait for “some kind of clarity” in the election results before commenting, but the Foreign Ministry seized the opportunity to criticize the United States in the same kind of language that some Russians believe Washington has for long time, and in the wrong way. gave them a lecture.
“With opponents of the office of president running roughly equal to each other, the obvious flaws in the US electoral system become clear,” said Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria V. Zakharova. “This is partly explained by the archaic legal code and its ambiguity on key issues, as we have said more than once.”
But the images on Russian television of poll workers in the United States diligently counting the ballots may have told their own story about how a democracy works.
Critics of the Kremlin have almost no ability to use the airwaves, so some tried to use social media to reject the narrative of electoral fraud in the United States. Vladimir Milov, an adviser to Navalny, wrote on Facebook that counting US ballots by mail could be trusted, unlike in Russia, where remote voting is especially prone to falsification.
“This is not Russia, where they hide the ballots in a safe at night for which the president of the electoral committee has a key,” Milov wrote.
Putin, for his part, won the right to run for two terms over six years in a constitutional referendum this summer that was carefully orchestrated to achieve a victory for him.
But if Putin chooses not to run again, he would lead a privileged existence that would not be available even to a post-presidential Trump, whose company faces a civil investigation by the New York attorney general.
A bill presented in the Russian Parliament on Thursday would give former presidents life-long immunity from prosecution.
Oleg Matsnev and Sophia Kishkovsky contributed research.
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