Putin’s Challenge: No Real Challengers

MOSCOW —  There were the usual chocolate Santas for sale this holiday season but they had nothing on the chocolate president. Muscovites with the means -- about $700, to be exact -- could buy a 12-by-19-inch portrait of President Vladimir V. Putin, done in dark bitter chocolate with milk chocolate highlights.

Though they haven’t necessarily been best-sellers -- Putin portraits in black velvet or etched on nesting dolls are easier on the wallet -- the chocolate Putins are bittersweet testimony to Putin’s 75% approval rating.

“We were thinking how we could express our patriotism in our work, what is there about our country which we love most of all?” said Yelena Moskovskaya, marketing chief at the Confael confectionary factory, which produced the stately sweets this fall for an exhibition in Paris. “Hence, this chocolate portrait of Putin.”

So popular is Putin these days that he is widely considered unbeatable in the March 14 presidential elections, when he will seek a second term. Therein lies the problem: Even as Putin seeks to expand the image of a democratic Russia in the West, no significant challenger has stepped forward to oppose him.

Without even the facade of a genuinely contested election, analysts say, there is the possibility that voter apathy or opposition demands for a boycott could result in a turnout of less than 50%, legally invalidating the results of the election and melting Putin’s image as a mainstream democratic politician.

“For Vladimir Putin, it means that his legitimacy becomes diminished. In some measure, it is what he now has to pay for the regime of the so-called managed democracy,” said Sergei Markov of the Institute of Political Studies.

Though the Putin administration has brought political stability and conditions for economic reform to Russia, Markov said, “at the same time, it has its negative consequences. The level of pluralism has decreased significantly.”

Earlier this month, in a parliamentary election widely criticized for allowing parties favorable to the Kremlin a substantial campaigning advantage, United Russia, the party backing Putin, gained enough votes and allies to capture 300 of the 450 seats in parliament that formally opened Monday. Critics said the party benefited from far greater access to television, billboards and other campaign aids, and questions were raised about ballot counts as well. The new majority is expected to allow the party to carry out the president’s program virtually unimpeded.

Two pro-Western democratic parties backed by business, Yabloko and the Union of Right Forces, were nearly shut out of the parliament and announced last week that they would not field candidates in the presidential election.

Both parties lost the majority of their funding after the October arrest of their major benefactor, former Yukos Oil Co. chief Mikhail Khodorkovsky, on tax evasion and fraud charges. The arrest, widely believed to be linked to Khodorkovsky’s open political activism, has left big business largely unwilling to step further into the political arena and, for the moment, has stranded pro-market political forces on the sidelines.

On Friday, colorful nationalist politician Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky announced that he was backing out of the presidential race, and his Liberal Democratic Party nominated a much lesser-known figure, Oleg Malyshkin, a 50-year-old parliament deputy and former boxer from the Rostov region.

In deciding not to run against Putin, the normally vituperative Zhirinovsky pointed to relative peace in the Caucasus, “positive” foreign policy results in the Far East and a “roll-back from the pro-NATO policy [that] is evident.”

“There is no negative against Putin, and there are no arguments to criticize him,” Zhirinovsky said.

The Communist Party, which has complained vociferously about rigged balloting in the parliamentary elections, on Sunday selected as its presidential candidate Nikolai Kharitonov, co-founder of the Agrarian Party, after longtime standard-bearer Gennady A. Zyuganov removed himself from the running. But the party is in such bad shape that it poses little risk to Putin, analysts agree.

At the same time, they said, a boycott would pose a risk for the Communists -- as well as all the opposition parties -- of simply disappearing from the political scene. Charismatic leftist economist Sergei Glazyev, who defected from the Communists last fall to lead his own Homeland nationalist-socialist bloc to a creditable showing in the parliamentary elections, could jump into the presidential race and grab whatever share of the voters is still loyal to the Communists, party leaders fear.

Still, even that scenario would pose little threat to Putin: It is widely believed that the Kremlin helped create Homeland as a means of chipping away support from the Communist Party.

Sergei Mitrokhin, deputy chairman of the Yabloko party, said his party is down to just four seats in the parliament and facing severe financial troubles because of Khodorkovsky’s arrest.

Mitrokhin himself lost his seat after nearly 10 years in the parliament. “The main reason we took the decision not to participate in the presidential election is the parliamentary election -- the unprecedented use of administrative resources, the absolute inequality of parties, and massive falsifications during the vote count,” he said in an interview Friday.

“This gives us every reason to forecast that the presidential elections will be even less fair,” he said. “If we take part in the elections, we will thus make them legitimate.”

Boris Nemtsov, a leader of the other business-oriented, democratic party, Union of Right Forces, admitted in an interview with the Gazeta newspaper this week that opposing Putin during the parliamentary elections seemed to many “a suicide. Because the people had been utterly brainwashed. When both the 1st and 2nd [television] channels keep singing from morning to night that ‘Putin is great,’ the people gradually begin to believe in this.”

But he said pro-market democratic forces are likely to regroup early next year and build a wider democratic opposition with new sources of financing -- not from the oligarchs, who now are fearful of opposing Putin, but from medium-sized businesses that do not pose a political threat to the Kremlin.

Irina Khakamada, another Union of Right Forces leader who lost her seat this month, said in an interview that democratic elements will cease to exist as a political force if they cede the playing field to Putin.

“It is not good for the president, either, if democratic candidates ignore this race,” she said. “If Putin continues the process of global activities together with other democratic nations, he needs to have a really serious democratic opposition within the country, with leaders who speak views which run counter to his position. If Putin in his race faces only nationalist-socialists, or representatives of his own Kremlin pool, it means that the project called ‘imitation democracy’ has completed its victory in Russia.”

Still unknown, but potentially important, is what role exiled oligarch Boris Berezovsky will play. The former media magnate, an avowed enemy of Putin now living in London, has pledged to defeat him and is backing the small Liberal Russia party, whose co-chairman, Ivan Rybkin, announced Wednesday that he is running for president. Rybkin, however, also did not rule out withdrawing later and boycotting the race.

Andrei Piontkovsky, director of Moscow’s Center for Strategic Studies, said “there is a real danger” that turnout could fall below the 50% mark and yield an invalid election.

“The election will be very interesting if it amounts to a fight between Mr. Putin and Mr. Boycott, Mr. Don’t Participate. And it’s a real possibility in terms of expressing the indignation of the democratic electorate,” Piontkovsky said.

Without enough political engagement to draw half the voters to the polls, he said, “it will be very difficult and embarrassing [for the Kremlin], because it will mean it will be necessary to throw in tens of millions of [fake] ballots to make up for the voters who didn’t vote.”

Indeed, 4.9% of the voters in this month’s parliamentary elections cast their votes “against all candidates.”

Olga Vyrodova, a 53-year-old homemaker, was one of them. She said her husband, a nuclear scientist, barely makes enough money to support the family.

“The life of my family has been a mess in the last 15 years, and it is not getting better at all,” she said. “This is my protest. I’m sure they don’t care. But I decided to go [to the polls] anyway and do it, just for the hell of it. To let them know they will not get my vote for what they are doing to me and my family.”

Times staff writer Sergei L. Loiko contributed to this report.