Kambolov takes South Ossetia with 85 percent after a Kremlin job swap

South Ossetia’s central election commission declared Marat Kambolov president on 19 September after Friday’s vote. Final figures released by the commission put him at 84.95 percent. Turnout was reported at 82.65 percent with 32,869 people voting in one tally and, earlier in the count, at 77.91 percent with 32,083 voters after 99 percent of precinct protocols. The earlier protocol count gave Kambolov 85.12 percent, Murat Valiev 3.75, Kazbek Kodoev 2.40 and Zurab Kokoev 1.35. About 5 percent voted against all. Vladimir Putin sent a telegram of congratulations that the Kremlin published the same day.

Kambolov is from North Ossetia, the Russian republic on the other side of the Caucasus. He had no prior political life in South Ossetia. He became prime minister in June when President Alan Gagloyev resigned to take a job as an adviser to Putin. Under the local constitution the prime minister became acting president. The parliament set the election for 18 September. A ten-year residency rule would have blocked Kambolov from the ballot. The main parties in the 34-seat parliament — Nykhas, United Ossetia, the Communists and the People’s Party, 25 deputies between them — endorsed him anyway, as did former presidents Lyudvig Chibirov, Leonid Tibilov and Anatoly Bibilov.

That endorsement list is the election. South Ossetia broke from Georgia in the early 1990s and survived as a separate administration because Russian troops and Russian money stayed. Moscow pays public wages and pensions, funds roads and keeps a military base in the territory. Georgia and most UN members still call the land Georgia. Russia, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Nauru and a short list of others call it a state. An acting president imported from North Ossetia, blessed by every local party that matters, then confirmed at 85 percent, is how that dependency looks on a ballot.

Kambolov campaigned on an audit of Russian financial aid and on anti-corruption. Those are safe themes in a place where the budget is a Russian transfer. They do not change the security treaty or the border with Georgia that runs through villages with two names. Tbilisi watched the vote as another marker of annexation by procedure. Reuters dated the story in Tbilisi for a reason. The audience that still treats South Ossetia as a Georgian file is in Georgia. The audience that treats it as a Russian file is in Moscow.

Gagloyev’s move to Putin’s staff is the other half of the weekend. A sitting president of a territory that depends on the Kremlin leaves the palace to sit closer to the man who pays the palace. The acting president who replaces him is a Russian federal official by background. The vote then ratifies the swap. Turnout in the high seventies or low eighties, on a register of about 41,000, is high enough for the commission to call it a mandate.

Valiev and Kodoev showed up for debates that Kambolov skipped. Kokoev skipped them too. The debates did not move the result. Single-digit scores for the named rivals are what a four-party endorsement plus three former presidents is designed to produce. “Against all” at 5 percent is the only column that reads as a shrug.

Recognition will not follow the percentage. No Western capital will open an embassy in Tskhinvali because Emilia Gagieva read 84.95 percent. The practical consequences are local and Russian: who signs the next aid schedule, who commands the local security organs, who speaks for the territory when Georgian and Russian border guards face each other on the line at Khurvaleti. Kambolov now does those three things with a title the commission has certified.

Putin’s telegram closes the circle that opened in June. The Kremlin chose a man, the parties in Tskhinvali formed a queue, the voters filled in the number, and the president of Russia said the number was correct. That is an election in a protectorate. It is also a fact on the ground that Tbilisi will have to keep living with, 85 percent or not.