Zyuganov pointedly refuses to meet with newly elected Russian president
MOSCOW, Russia — On his own initiative, Vladimir Putin, Russia’s newly elected head of state and the country’s current prime minister, who won the March 4 election in a landslide, invited his former rivals for the Kremlin on Monday for a tet-a-tet meeting in one of the state residences outside Moscow.
However, at the meeting in Putin’s office residence, all the former contenders for the Kremlin turned up, except for Gennady Zyuganov, the head of the Russian Communist Party, who, unlike the other election participants — Liberal Democratic Party Chairman Vladimir Zhirinovsky, Just Russia Leader Sergei Mironov, and Mikhail Prokhorov, the billionaire owner of the Onexim Group., who was an independent and self-nominated candidate for the presidential race — has yet to accept the election results.
Indeed, the Communist Party leader, who came second in the presidential election, has an axe to grind with the Kremlin for its lopsided support of Putin at expense of the others, and more notably, its excessive use of the so-called ‘administrative resources’ — factors that made the poll illegitimate, and the official results non and void.
Commenting on Zyuganov’s unexpected decision not to attend the meeting, Dmitry Peskov, the president-elect’s spokesman, expressed regret, saying such behavior will not promote rapid normalization of the tense political situation in the country. “We invited Zyuganov to this meeting, but he refused to attend. We are sorry about this, as political life does not end with the end of an election.”
Although the head of the Communist Party did not explain his reason for his refusal to attend the meeting, Peskov, however, speculatively linked the behavior to the strong statement made by Zyuganov immediately after the announcement of the preliminary results by the election authorities.
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