Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2012-02-01-Speech-3-207-000"
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"en.20120201.15.3-207-000"2
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".
Mr President, Baroness Ashton, ladies and gentlemen, while we are currently experiencing Siberian cold weather, the political situation in Russia has been hotting up since the fraudulent Duma elections of December last year, which were manipulated.
The findings of the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR) and the election monitors from the Russian NGO Golos have shown that these elections were not free or fair. Since then Russian civil society, which we believed had sunk into apathy, has begun to take action. A growing protest movement has emerged, which is fuelled by self-respect. It is calling for an honest Russia that will no longer tolerate paternalistic rule. It is also demanding the annulment of the Duma elections, the removal from office of the head of the central electoral commission, new elections under the terms of the new election act promised by Mr Medvedev for 2013 and, most importantly, free, fair and correct presidential elections.
Perhaps what we are seeing in Russia is what we had hoped very much would emerge from the Arab Spring and which is now regarded with scepticism: a genuine democratic new beginning, the birth of a civil society. The poet Dmitrii Bykov described the situation very aptly during the big demonstration on 24 December when he said that life with all its dangers and risks is awaiting a newborn baby, but the baby has now been born and he cannot be pushed back into the womb.
Russia’s controlled democracy is escaping from state control. If, as some people say, it really were a sovereign democracy and not a stage-managed one, no one would need to be afraid of genuine elections, because the elected government would be able to rely on sovereign power.
Ms Oomen-Ruijten has said that Mr Putin wants economic competition, as he recently explained, because he has been forced to acknowledge that, without competition, the rule of law and the fight against corruption, it will not be possible to modernise Russian society and to develop a healthy SME sector. However, this also applies to the regeneration of society, which will not be able to make progress without political competition and debate and this has been gradually blocked since Mr Putin took power.
However, the crippling social contract which is based on the principle of ‘you let us live and we will let you govern’ has now been terminated. Civil society is taking back its political rights. After fighting for the right of freedom of assembly, next Saturday the protest movement will begin its struggle for the right to demonstrate. It will be 22 years since the memorable date of 4 February 1990, when hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets of Moscow to call for the removal of the article in the constitution which enshrined the leading role of the communist party.
Today the demonstrations are against the Kremlin’s monopoly of power and in favour of the separation of powers. They are about the choice between Russia as an alternative power on the basis of its raw materials, together with Putin’s ‘power vertical’ involving the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), and a democratic, pluralist, knowledge, information and market society which has an open relationship with the EU. The question is whether given all our efforts to establish a relationship, our willingness to cooperate and our modernisation partnership, we will be able to bring about a real partnership based on values."@en1
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