EPAAdvertisement board with a photo of Putin in the Russian city of Saint Petersburg
NOS Nieuws•vandaag, 21:29
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Geert Groot Koerkamp
Correspondent Russia
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Geert Groot Koerkamp
Correspondent Russia
Russian voters can go to the polls on Friday, Saturday and Sunday to elect a new president for the next six years. There is no doubt about who that will be. The election should give Vladimir Putin the green light for his fifth term in office, which will last until 2030. If he serves it, he will be in power for more than thirty years, including the few years he governed the country as prime minister.
It promises to be just about the most boring election in recent Russian history. There is no question of any battle, unless it is half-hearted rearguard action over who gets to take second place.
The fight for second place
That battle is between the three candidates who are on the ballot next to Putin (71), representatives of political parties that are loyal to the Kremlin and who wholeheartedly support the bills initiated by the incumbent power in parliament. All three support the ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine and are therefore included on various Western sanctions lists. If they are critical of anything, it is certainly not of Putin.
75-year-old Nikolai Charitonov is participating on behalf of the Communist Party. He did this once before, in 2004. The party chose Charitonov over Gennady Zyuganov (79), who was initially going to participate. Zyuganov has participated in the presidential elections four times since 1996.
Leonid Slutsky (56) represents the right-wing Liberal Democratic Party, which he has led since the death of founder Vladimir Zhirinovsky in 2022. His main campaign slogan is ‘Zhirinovsky’s cause lives’. Zhirinovsky has contested every Russian presidential election since 1991 (when the Soviet Union still existed), so these are the first to take place without him. But thanks to Slutsky’s campaign, he is somewhat involved.
An outsider is Vladislav Davankov, by far the youngest of the bunch at 40 years old. Davankov is deputy chairman of the State Duma, the Russian House of Representatives, on behalf of the New People party – a Kremlin project from 2020. He tries to profile himself as a ‘reasonable alternative’ and regularly uses the word ‘peace’, which makes him attractive to some voters. Some polls predict he will come second behind Putin with around 6 percent of the votes. The incumbent president could count on roughly 80 percent of the votes.
Unheard people
Millions of Russians are not represented in these elections. These are the people who condemn Russia’s actions in Ukraine and the extra-parliamentary opposition to Putin. Among them are also the tens of thousands who came to pay their last respects to opposition leader Alexei Navalny in Moscow, loudly chanting anti-war slogans.
Two candidates who wanted to give these groups a voice were not allowed into the presidential race. The regional politician Ekaterina Doentsova was sidetracked at an early stage, under the pretext of procedural errors in the nomination. She now wants to set up her own political party to participate in future elections.
Liberal politician Boris Nadezhdin was allowed to advance to the next round, in which he had to collect at least one hundred thousand signatures in support of his candidacy. He more than succeeded; the long lines of people who came to support him across the country left no doubt about that. But the Central Election Commission also put an end to his ambitions.
In the absence of a candidate of their own, many of these people will want to participate on the most important election day on Sunday in a campaign devised by the Petersburg politician Maksim Reznik and wholeheartedly supported by Navalny. ‘Against Putin at 12 o’clock’ is the motto of the campaign, which means that those who are against the sitting president report to the polling station around noon, not earlier and not later. This should demonstrate that many people are really against Putin and against the war and show that the president does not have the overwhelming majority behind him, whatever the outcome.
Reuters Ballot boxes have also been set up in the occupied regions of Ukraine, such as here in Mariupol, where people could cast their votes earlier. That doesn’t happen without pressure.
These official election results must be viewed with some skepticism. Previous elections have always been plagued by massive ballot box fraud, according to statistical analyzes of the ballot box. Apart from this, a normal election campaign in Russia is hampered by the lack of free media, the exclusion of undesirable candidates and opposition from independent election observers. Electronic voting, actively encouraged by the government, also makes elections less transparent.
“Free expression of will has become impossible,” the independent Russian election watchdog Golos (De Vote) concludes in a new report on the campaign. “The current elections cannot provide an image of what citizens really think and do not give them the opportunity to independently decide on the future of the country.”
The organization has been active in Russia since 2000 and was declared a ‘foreign agent’ in 2013, after which it continued as a movement without legal personality. The movement’s head, Grigori Melkonjants, was arrested in August for collaborating with an Eastern European NGO banned in Russia. He could receive up to six years in prison for this. His pre-trial detention has been extended until April, so until after the elections.
2024-03-14 20:29:46
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