Questions by Ben Noble, responses by Nikolai Petrov.
Elections for the State Duma will take place over three days, from Friday 18 to Sunday 20 September. When we spoke in July, you said that the Kremlin’s ideal election was one that attracted little public attention and produced no surprises. With just over a week until the State Duma elections, is that what has happened?
There is virtually no election campaign. The authorities are deliberately suppressing turnout by doing their utmost to keep the elections out of the public eye.
But the Kremlin is facing a clear and unexpected challenge relating to the liberal, anti-war political party Yabloko.
In allowing Yabloko to register, the Kremlin calculated that a party with which voters had long grown disillusioned would win its customary 1.5 per cent of the vote. This was intended to demonstrate how little public demand there was for an end to the war.
But, to the Kremlin’s surprise, the party’s slogan, ‘For Peace and Freedom’, has resonated strongly with a significant section of Russian society.
The sudden surge of interest in Yabloko’s anti-war position among voters, particularly young people, alarmed the authorities to such an extent that they were prepared to lose face: a court removed Yabloko’s federal list of candidates from the ballot little more than a week after the Central Election Commission had registered it.
This is the Kremlin’s most serious reputational defeat of the campaign – and Yabloko’s finest hour, which will, in all likelihood, be followed by the party’s forced dissolution.
Moreover, this may not be the authorities’ last setback in the current election. By so crudely denying voters a legal means of expressing their position at the ballot box, the authorities risk provoking electoral protest in other forms, such as casting invalid ballots to reject all parties and candidates, or voting at a designated time to demonstrate the scale of opposition sentiment.
As a result, an election conceived as a plebiscite demonstrating complete support for the Kremlin and for continuing the war in Ukraine could end in additional embarrassment.
In July, you argued that the war was becoming the most important factor shaping the campaign. Has the campaign since then strengthened or weakened that assessment?
The overall pattern of the campaign, which became fully apparent at the second stage of United Russia’s congress in late August, can be described as a politically contradictory strategy.
On the one hand, the authorities are trying to present the situation as the new normal – no easy task amid a sharp increase in Ukrainian strikes deep inside Russia and the resulting logistical disruptions and fuel shortages.
On the other, they are vigorously playing the patriotism card, invoking both external and internal foes against whom an uncompromising struggle must be waged.
At the United Russia congress, these two faces of the campaign were embodied by Vladimir Putin, who played the good cop, and Dmitry Medvedev, who played the bad cop.
The Kremlin simultaneously seeks to mobilise citizens politically against the enemy and fears that a mobilised electorate may slip out of its control. Unable to offer an appealing vision of the future, United Russia has cobbled together a programme of vague socioeconomic proposals and is making little effort to promote it.
At the same time, United Russia’s programme itself is distinctly non-militaristic and populist, while the rhetoric of leading party figures, including Medvedev and Vladimir Yakushev, Secretary of the party’s General Council, depicts Russia under threat from the West.
What should we be looking for in the results beyond United Russia’s headline vote share and number of seats?
United Russia will secure a comfortable supermajority, largely through the single-member constituencies, where one recent expert survey suggested that the party could win as many as 210 of the 225 first-past-the-post seats available; the same survey estimated that the party could win up to an additional 130 seats through proportional representation.
Sixteen constituencies are regarded as negotiated exceptions: United Russia has fielded weak candidates there to give strong candidates from the ‘systemic opposition’ – which the Kremlin considers useful in the State Duma – a chance to win.
It will also be important to see where electoral discontent finds an outlet in regions where Yabloko has traditionally been strong: St Petersburg and Karelia, as well as the Pskov, Kaliningrad, and Sverdlovsk regions.
Yabloko’s constituency candidates may perform much better than usual in some of these places.
Many of those who had intended to vote for Yabloko may instead support New People – superficially, at least, the most respectable of the parties still taking part in the election.
Most Russian regions today are what are often called ‘electoral sultanates’. Both the conduct of elections and, more importantly, the officially announced results are entirely under the Kremlin’s control.
The scope for electoral manipulation has expanded considerably through the mass introduction of remote electronic voting – covering 33 regions with 48 million voters – and the near-complete elimination of independent election monitoring.
Finally, it will be important to see what results the Kremlin reports in the four Ukrainian regions that Russia claimed to annex in 2022, where voting is taking place under martial law.
How important are the regional elections taking place alongside the State Duma contest – and might they tell us more about the state of Russian politics than the national results do?
Direct gubernatorial elections will be held in the Penza, Bryansk, Belgorod, Tver, and Ulyanovsk regions, and the republics of Mordovia, Tuva, and Chechnya. No major surprises should be expected, although Bryansk and Belgorod are now frontline regions whose residents experience the war in their daily lives rather than through television.
Elections to regional legislative assemblies will take place in 39 regions. In almost half of them, United Russia performed relatively poorly in 2021.
The situation has since improved for the Kremlin in some places, but difficulties can still be expected in St Petersburg, Karelia, and Primorye, and in the Vologda, Murmansk, Novgorod, Oryol, and Tver regions. This is particularly true given that, in several of these regions, the authorities are now scrambling to have Yabloko’s regional lists removed through the courts.
With the Kremlin currently concentrating all its efforts on securing the desired outcome in the federal elections, failures and high-profile scandals are all the more likely in the regional contests.
