Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump face an autumn where they will have to navigate between ballot boxes. Parliamentary elections in Russia, and in the United States, which do not decide who will continue to rule the Kremlin and the White House, but which can condition the immediate future on crucial issues such as the war in Ukraine or the one in the Middle East. Between the elections for the Russian Duma on September 20 and those for the US Congress on November 3, six weeks will pass, a short enough period to detect in which interests Putin and Trump coincide, and where they clash and grate.
They are two autocrats leading two powers. With notable differences in time in power. Trump's two terms add up to six years and Putin has accumulated twenty-six. However, it should not be overlooked that if Trump does not hide his good relationship with Putin, it is because he shares with him ways of understanding life, the world, and power: ways of calculating and operating. Of deceiving and imposing oneself.
The one who best analyzes and defines the coincidences between the two autocrats is the thinker Anne Applebaum when she states that Trump and Putin are part of a global network of interconnected interests, where aspiring dictators, despite rivalries, mutually support each other to weaken democratic values and consolidate a system of unchecked power. It is about capturing the state apparatus and getting rid of democracy, hollowing it out, making it illiberal, and attacking institutions like the UN or the International Criminal Court. This does not imply sharing ideology: complicity is enough to share business networks and cover for each other.
Equidistances
It is the case of Ukraine. Until now, both autocrats have staged equidistant stances, but Trump ends up favoring Putin. It turns out that Ukraine depends on the American-made Patriot missile defense system, and that the war in Iran has forced the US to incorporate them into the Gulf arsenal, thus making possible the terrible Russian bombings on Kyiv. All this while in Washington no one dares to say that the calculations have not been done well, that the Pentagon's warehouses are emptying, and that they now need to be refilled in a hurry.
And how is the ballot box landscape shaping up? For the US Congress, the left wing of the Democratic Party is showing its hidden cards, the most effective being Abdul El-Sayed, of Egyptian origin, winner of the primaries as senator for Michigan. Trump is even more worried by El-Sayed than by the Muslim Mamdani serving as mayor of New York. Estimates say that by November 3rd, Trump can only count on the support of 30% of Americans. Results, therefore, are unpredictable and raise a question: could Trump in the autumn of 2026 represent a scene similar to that of January 2021, when he did not accept defeat?
In the Russian ballot boxes, the Putinist calculation seems to be prevailing. United Russia, the Kremlin's party, could reach 30% on September 20th, and with the support of the communists and the nationalist far-right, it would achieve a comfortable absolute majority. The exclusion of the historic liberal party Yabloko, which is against the war, and the eleven-year prison sentence for Lev Shlosberg, one of its leaders, reduces – once again – the Russian elections to a political marketing festival without any democratic content. It seems that Putin is waiting for the spectacular electoral percentages that he himself promotes to announce a general mandatory conscription that would shake society. A reckless maneuver.
