Monday, December 03, 2007

A little bit about Russia

So yesterday Russia held their parliamentary elections, no surprise in the result. Putin's party won more than 60% of the vote and there are complaints of widespread voter manipulation.

I also noticed the news that the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) announced that they are beginning talks with 5 new countries to join, among them Estonia and Russia.

I didn't know much about OECD so I check out their website and their mission statement is as follows:

The OECD brings together the governments of countries committed to democracy and the market economy from around the world to:

• Support sustainable economic growth
• Boost employment
• Raise living standards
• Maintain financial stability
• Assist other countries' economic development
• Contribute to growth in world trade


I wonder how the Russia fit's into that criteria, based on this weekends performance their doesn't seem to be much "democracy" going on there.

1 Comments:

Blogger akarlin said...

1. The OECD doesn't follow that condition to the letter. One of its founder members in 1961, Turkey, was then under military government. Spain and Portugal, other founding members, were under Franco and Salazar.

2. Your view that Russia is not a democracy is subjective and not grounded in facts. It is also interesting that you mention Estonia amongst the five countries of note but fail to bring up their systematic discrimination against the Russophone linguistic minority.

7:51 AM  

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