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Kasparov calls for vote boycott
01/11/2007 18:12 - (SA)
Moscow - Chess champion turned opposition leader Garry Kasparov on Thursday called on Russians to spoil their ballots in December 2 parliamentary elections to protest a poll that he said "will be decided in private".
"The number of spoiled votes will be a sign of the support for the opposition," he told journalists at a briefing in Moscow. "This is our form of boycott."
Kasparov's opposition coalition, The Other Russia, has failed to secure registration for next month's elections.
The authorities' decision to withdraw the option on ballots to vote "against all" means that a spoiled ballot is now the only way to register a protest vote, Kasparov said.
The Other Russia is also planning anti-Kremlin demonstrations in Moscow on November 24 and in Russia's second city, Saint Petersburg, on November 25, Kasparov said.
Several earlier protests by the group, dubbed "Dissenters' Marches" gained international attention after they were violently broken up by police.
A fierce critic of the regime of President Vladimir Putin, Kasparov compared Russia's current political system with that of the communist regime of East Germany, saying it was a "soft one-party system".
"The Kremlin no longer makes much of an effort to hide the fact that the results of the elections will be decided in private," he said.
Despite Kasparov's high profile and sharp criticism of Putin's regime, his movement has proven incapable of uniting the country's small and fractured opposition.
- AFP
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