vlad.tribnet.com / Issue #620 / Special reports / Reading article...

United Russia candidate and Federation Council member Igor Pushkaryov on Sunday predictably won Vladivostok mayoral elections gathering 57 percent of the votes, though the voter turnout hardly reached 23 percent.

According to the preliminary results as of Tuesday, Pushkaryov, 33, managed to collect support from 106,000 voters. He was followed by Gennady Turmov, a candidate from the Communist Party branch in Vladivostok, who won 32.78 percent of the vote. Another two candidates, the owner of the newspaper Dalyokaya Okraina Vladimir Gilgenberg and businessman Sergei Tatarnikov, gathered 5.88 and 1.63 percent of the vote respectively.

Almost 3,000 of the ballots were rendered as invalid. With election campaign being focused on one candidate and other candidates banned from the participation, the city’s residents may have deliberately spoilt the ballots to show their protest. The low attendance can be also explained by lack of interest to the elections which seemed to be manipulated by the officials from the very beginning.

The predicted victory of Pushkaryov was announced Tuesday while the official results will be announced within the next five days. Pushkaryov will be sworn in mayoral office this Friday at a special Duma session. He will occupy the post for five years.

The elections were appointed after Vladivostok’s mayor Vladimir Nikolayev was sentenced in December 2007 by the city’s Leninsky Court to a suspended four and a half year imprisonment for the abuse of power.