Support for Vladimir Putin at this month’s presidential polls was significantly higher in rural areas and small towns, an opinion poll released on Tuesday indicated.
“The highest level of support for Putin was in small towns and villages and stood at 70 percent,” the All-Russian Public Opinion Research Centre (VTsIOM) state pollster said in a statement.
But Putin only enjoyed the backing of 45 percent of respondents from Russia’s biggest cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg, said VTSiOM, which polled 1,600 people nationwide on March 10-11.
It also suggested people with a higher education were less likely to vote for Putin (58 percent versus 68 percent). But the poll said there was little difference between Internet users (62 percent) and non-Internet users (68 percent).
Putin was elected to a third term in the Kremlin with almost 64 percent of the vote, securing victory in the first round. The elections took place to the backdrop of the largest demonstrations against his rule since he first came to power in 2000. Protest rallies began after alleged vote fraud in favor of Putin’s United Russia party at December’s parliamentary polls and continued in the days following his election triumph.
“People in small towns and villages are much more traditional and conservative,” VTsIOM Centre Political Research Department head Stepan Lvov told RIA Novosti. “As we saw, the mass protests took place in large cities.”
Protest leader Yevgenia Chirikova pointed to Putin’s relatively poor poll showing in the capital – where he took just under 50 percent – as proof that the president-elect had “lost Moscow, at the very least.”
Russia's rural areas trail big cities in terms of infrastructure and their average ages are generally much higher.
“Of course, there has always been a massive difference between Russia’s rural areas and its large cities,” said Alexei Mukhin, of the Moscow-based Center for Political Information think tank. “The capital has always been a lot more progressive.”
“Putin has to try now to fulfill his pre-electoral promises to rectify the situation in Moscow,” he added.
