UK pokes nose into foreign elections

British officials are attacking the democratic elections in countries, not exactly considered as their friends, after their own general election landed in a major scandal in 2010 with the majority of ‘elected’ MPs lacking public support. Former Foreign Secretary David Miliband said on Sunday, as Russians went to polling stations for the Presidential elections, that Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is a “ruthless” dictator, whose days are numbered. Miliband’s attempt to discredit the Russian vote came after Putin’s United Russia party won a majority 52.88 percent of the Russian parliamentary seats in December and, pollsters say, is poised to win 60 percent of the votes in the Sunday ballot to secure his third non-consecutive term as president. This is while, according to the British Electoral Reform Society, two thirds of the MPs elected in the 2010 general election in Britain lacked the majority support, thanks to the questionable First Past The Post (FPTP) election system used in the country. The scandal was unprecedented in the British political history and triggered attempts to reform the voting system. Anti-FPTP activists said the system allows extremist groups a bigger chance of entering the parliament while encouraging candidates to run mud-slinging campaigns against other candidates to gain votes. Against that background, Miliband accuses Putin, and by implication his party, of seeking “vested interests” rather than the public’s call for reform, stressing that the Russian government is simply ignoring. "It is wrong to underestimate Putin. He is intelligent, worldly and ruthless. In the first term of his presidency … the rhetoric and to some extent reality was about reform as well as order. Russians got their pride back - floating on a tide of oil and gas revenues. But since then Russian reform has gone into reverse, and vested interests consolidated their positions," Miliband wrote in an article for The Sun on Sunday. Miliband’s accusations follow recent attempts in London to raise questions about the referendum in Syria and the parliamentary elections in Iran. British Foreign Secrtary William Hague said on February 27 that the referendum in Syria, where almost 90 percent of people backed constitutional reforms "has fooled nobody." Hague followed the same line on Iran after millions of Iranians took to the polling stations for the parliamentary elections on Friday. “It has been clear for some time that these elections would not be free and fair. [The government] has presented the vote as a test of loyalty, rather than an opportunity for people freely to choose their own representatives,” he said in a statement. Hague claimed the ballot was held in a “climate of fear” and “repression” but failed to explain how such an atmosphere is amenable to the massive public turnout, which was widely covered by news channels across the globe. In reaction to his accusations, Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast said Hague is trying to downplay the Iranians high participation figures. Majority vote did matter in triggering Hague’s remarks - as did those of Miliband - as common sense rules a majority, whether in Russia, Syria or in Iran, clearly shows the public sentiment about their governments. It also does matter in retrospective as it is the British government that lacks the essential element of democracy, i.e. the majority backing.