Vladimir Putin's United Russia party is confronted with a cartoon pig named Nakh-Nakh in Sunday's parliamentary election. A series of animated clips posted on the Internet challenge the status quo leadership.
Vladimir Putin's United Russia party faces an array of Communists, nationalists and liberals in a parliamentary election on Sunday, but one of its ardent opponents is a more peculiar political animal: a cartoon pig named Nakh-Nakh.
Skip to next paragraphPushed to the margins since Putin came to power 12 years ago, some of the prime minister's fiercest foes are urging Russians to reject the political system he has put in place by spoiling their ballots in Sunday's State Duma vote.
"This is not an election in the European sense of the word, because no party that presents a challenge, or has not been agreed with the Kremlin, has been allowed to run," said satirist Viktor Shenderovich, a co-founder of the Nakh-Nakh movement.
"The question is what people who understand this is a farce should do."
Their answer: Nakh-Nakh, a bespectacled pig with an orange scarf, a blue beret and a double-entendre of a name that to Russians evokes both the Three Little Pigs and an obscenity which, put more politely, means 'Go away!'.
Shenderovich and his allies have enlisted Nakh-Nakh to show Russians how to show what they think of the election.
In a series of animated clips posted on the Internet, the pink-cheeked pig casts his vote, angrily marking the box for each party with an X and adding a big black X across the entire ballot before slipping it through the slot.
A caricature of?Putin appears repeatedly: in a poster on the wall of the polling place, atop the shoulders of all the poll workers and adjacent to the names of all seven parties' names on the ballot.
In one clip -- "Nakh-Nakh's Scary Dream" -- the pig attends a Kremlin banquet but soon finds he is the main dish, an apple stuffed in his mouth and his body carved into butcher's cuts labeled with the names of the seven parties on Sunday's ballot.
The message: It's the same no matter how you slice it.
"Cross out the thieving authorities. Spoil the celebration. Come to the election. Vote against all," one clip says. "Vote for Russia."
AGAINST ALL
Russians used to be able to register disapproval of their choice by marking an "against all" box on the ballot.
Nearly three million voters did so in the 2003 election to the Duma, Russia's lower parliament house. The "against all" option received 4.7 percent of the votes, more than 19 of the 23 parties on the ballot.
The Duma then passed legislation striking the "against all" option from ballots, part of a series of electoral reforms enacted during Putin's 2000-2008 presidency that critics said were meant to silence dissent and strengthen his grip on power.
The Kremlin-controlled parliament also raised the threshold needed to win State Duma seats to 7 percent and threw up other barriers to potential challengers.
Putin's political foes have also faced plenty of other hurdles, from riot police that routinely break up unsanctioned protests to tightly managed national television and federal authorities they say have barred them from elections illegally.
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