Russia votes in elections without guarantees and with Putin's popularity at a low point

MoscowIt had been three years since Vladimir Putin kissed children in public, a symptom that his popularity is wavering. The poor polls for his party, United Russia, have forced him to get involved in the campaign for the Russian legislative elections, which are being held between this Friday and Sunday. They are the first in wartime and the first in which the inhabitants of the occupied Ukrainian territories are participating, who have already begun to vote in ballot boxes guarded by armed soldiers. These are elections manipulated by the Kremlin, with the pacifist opposition banned, where the overwhelming victory of the ruling party is taken for granted and which, in a context of social unrest due to economic problems, internet blocks, and conflict fatigue, the authorities hope will pass without much notice or surprise.

According to experts, as contradictory as it may seem in an authoritarian state, Russia is a very legalistic country and Putin is a president who strives to base his power on the law. Analyst Dan Storyev, author of the book How to survive authoritarianism, explains to ARA that the Russian leader seeks to project "a facade" of respectability for the global public and the domestic public. "These are not real elections, but a kind of political theater that is done to shore up the power of the state, consolidate its legitimacy, and pay homage to the democratic legacy of the 90s," he explains.

This need for validation prevents the authorities from committing electoral fraud without hesitation. "They don't like to manipulate elections completely, they don't want to do it North Korea-style," notes Storyev. As Mikhail Komin, a researcher at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), points out in this newspaper, the power "does not have the capacity to completely rewrite the final results" and places the limit of distortion between 20% and 30%. In 2021, in the last legislative elections, mathematician Sergei Shpilkin established that half of United Russia's votes, some 14 million, had been fraudulent. Thus, instead of getting 50% of the votes, it should have ended up with around 30%.

At this moment, official polls give Putin's party between 47% and 53% of the vote, figures that do not correspond to the historic low of 27% voting intention that United Russia had a few months ago. In order to avoid surprises, the president has let himself be seen surrounded by carefully chosen citizens in regions of Siberia and the Far East, far from the threat of Ukrainian drones. However, he has not deemed it appropriate to take advantage of the campaign to address the social issues that worry the population, but rather the opposite, he has dedicated himself to asking Russians to rally around his war, with rhetoric close to total mobilization and demanding the unity of all sectors of society against the enemy.

A mock campaign

Economic difficulties and the presidential administration's desire to reduce the elections to a mere formality have made this campaign the cheapest of the 21st century. Territorial debates on state television have been broadcast at ungodly hours; in some regions, candidates have preferred not to participate at all, and in others, several speakers did not even use their final minute to ask for votes. The lack of interest from the parties themselves is part of the rules of Russian political theater in times of war: all groups with representation in the Duma support the invasion and have voted in favor of at least 95% of United Russia's initiatives.

The Communist Party aspires to repeat its second-place finish from 2021, when it obtained 19% of the vote, ahead of the populist far-right Liberal Democratic Party (8%), the social democrats of A Just Russia (7%), and the liberals of New People (5%). Except for the communists, all these formations have been promoted or encouraged in collusion with Putin's circle. "They are variants of the futures and acceptable policies that the Kremlin offers the Russian people. Everything is a permitted mutation of United Russia's policy," notes Storyev.

The analyst does not believe that any of these formations is capable of capitalizing on social discontent because "they are all part of the narrative favorable to the war." Komin adds that the proportion of voters who "really and consciously choose" among the available parties "is not very large" and places it between 12% and 18%. Thus, taking into account electoral fraud, programmatic similarities, and the inexorable victory of Putin's party, what drives Russians to vote? Storyev finds an explanation: "Many think it is a unique opportunity to express their opinion to the government and get it to listen to them."

Whatever happens, however, experts rule out Russia taking a new path starting Monday. According to Komin, one can expect a strengthening of the warmongers within the government and a weakening of the technocrats, but Storyev asserts that "nothing will change in a tangible way." "A single man will continue to rule, and that man's power is not threatened by the elections," he concludes.