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President of Tatarstan overrules vote to hold election |
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October 5, 2000
MOSCOW (AP) - The president of Russia's Tatarstan region overruled a local parliamentary vote to hold elections for regional leader three months earlier than planned, Russian media reported on Wednesday. Tatarstan President Mintimer Shaimiyev, who was on vacation at the time of the vote last month, said the date change would look legally dubious and must not be made, according to the Segodnya newspaper. Tatarstan's parliament, which supports Shaimiyev, voted last month to push up the March vote to December. It apparently wanted to give him a better chance of winning a third term, though Shaimiyev had not announced he would run again. Analysts had speculated that the parliament's move was also aimed at getting around a federal law that bars regional leaders from serving more than two terms. Tatarstan has no such ban. The discrepancy is just one of several cases where regional laws contradict federal law, and President Vladimir Putin has promised to bring the provinces in line with the center. Still, he has given the regions until 2001 to revise their laws, and the newspaper speculated that Shaimiyev would seek a third term and then iron out Tatarstan's election rules once he was safely reinstalled in office. Shaimiyev is one of Russia's most powerful regional leaders, having won substantial autonomy from the federal government under a deal struck in 1994. He was one of the founders of an opposition group last year but later abandoned the movement and has backed Putin. |