2024-03-15 07:10:00
(CNN) — In Russia, the presidential election is already underway that will most likely extend Vladimir Putin’s government until at least 2030.
The vast majority of votes will be cast over three days starting March 15, although early and mail-in voting began earlier, including in occupied areas of Ukraine, where Russian forces are trying to exert their authority.
But this is not a normal election: the vote will essentially consist of checking constitutional boxes with no prospect of removing Putin from power.
The current president’s dominance over the Russian electoral system strengthened as the elections approached. The country’s only anti-war candidate has been banned from running, and Alexey Navalny, the poisoned and imprisoned opposition leader who was the most prominent anti-Putin voice in Russia, died under mysterious circumstances in mid-February.
How long has Putin been in power and until when could he extend his mandate?
In 2021, Putin signed a law that enabled him to run for two more presidential terms—of six years each—which could extend his term until 2036, after a referendum the previous year allowed him to reset the limit clock. of his mandate.
This election will mark the beginning of the first of those two additional terms.
Basically, he has been the country’s head of state throughout the 21st century, rewriting the rules and conventions of the Russian political system in pursuit of expanding his powers.
That already makes him the ruler with the longest time in charge of power in Russia since Joseph Stalin, during the Soviet Union.
Putin’s moves to maintain control of the Kremlin included a constitutional amendment in 2008 that extended presidential terms from four to six years, and a temporary swap of positions with his then-prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, the same year, which preceded a quick return to the presidency in 2012.
When and where are elections held?
Voting takes place from Friday, March 15 to Sunday, March 17; It is the first Russian presidential election to take place over three days.
Three weeks after that, a second round of voting is planned in case no candidate wins more than half the vote, although it would be a big surprise if it were necessary.
This time, the Russians only elect the position of president. The next legislative elections, which form the Duma, are scheduled for 2026.
Early voting began in hard-to-reach areas since the last week of February, and approximately 70,000 people are eligible to vote in remote areas of Russia’s Far Eastern Federal District, according to state news agency TASS. The region represents more than a third of Russia’s total territory, but only has about 5% of its population.
Before Friday, early voting had also begun in Zaporizhzhia, one of four Ukrainian regions that Russia said it would annex in September 2022 in violation of international law, TASS said.
Russia has already held regional votes and referendums in those occupied territories, an action questioned by the international community and called a farce, but which the Kremlin considers fundamental to its Russification campaign.
Who is competing against Putin in these elections?
Election candidates in Russia are closely monitored by the Central Election Commission (CEC), allowing Putin to compete with a favorable field and reducing the chances of an opposition candidate gaining momentum.
The same thing happens for this election. “Each candidate presents juxtaposed ideologies and domestic policies, but collectively they fuel Putin’s goal of tightening his grip on Russia during his next presidential term,” wrote Callum Fraser of the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) think tank.
Nikolay Kharitonov will be a candidate representing the Communist Party, which has been allowed to field a candidate in every election since 2000, but has failed to win even a fifth of the vote in any election since.
Two other Duma politicians, Leonid Slutsky and Vladislav Davankov, are also running. Davankov is vice president of the Duma, the lower house of the Russian parliament, while Slutsky represents the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, the party formerly led by ultranationalist firebrand Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who died in 2022. All of them are considered pro-Kremlin candidates.
Strictly speaking, there is no candidate in the race who opposes Putin’s war in Ukraine. Boris Nadezhdin, the only pacifist figure in the election, was banned from the election by the CEC in early February after the body claimed that he had not received enough legitimate signatures supporting his candidacy.
In December, another independent candidate who had been outspoken against the war in Ukraine, Yekaterina Duntsova, was rejected by the CEC, citing alleged errors in her campaign group’s registration documents. Duntsova later called on people to support Nadezhdin’s candidacy.
In early February, opposition activist Leonid Volkov dismissed the elections as a “circus” on social media, saying they were meant to ratify Putin’s overwhelming mass support. “It is necessary to understand what the March ‘elections’ mean for Putin. They are a propaganda effort to spread hopelessness” among the electorate, Volkov said.
Are the elections fair?
Elections in Russia are neither free nor fair and will essentially serve as a formality to extend Putin’s term in power, according to independent bodies and observers both inside and outside the country.
Putin’s successful campaigns have been in part the result of “preferential treatment in the media, numerous abuses in office, and procedural irregularities during vote counting,” according to Freedom House, a global democracy watchdog.
Outside of election cycles, the Kremlin’s propaganda machine targets voters with occasionally hysterical pro-Putin material, and many news websites based outside Russia were banned following the invasion of Ukraine, although younger voters and Tech-savvy people are used to using VPN to access them.
Protests are also strictly restricted, making public expression of opposition a dangerous and rare occurrence.
Then, when elections approach, it is almost inevitable that real opposition candidates will have their candidacies withdrawn or be prevented from running for office, as Nadezhdin and Duntsova discovered during this cycle.
“Opposition politicians and activists are frequently the subject of trumped-up criminal cases and other forms of administrative harassment designed to impede their participation in the political process,” Freedom House noted in its most recent global report.
Do Russians support Putin?
Measuring true popular opinion is very difficult in Russia, where the few think tanks independents operate under strict surveillance and where, even if a poll is legitimate, many Russians fear criticizing the Kremlin.
But Putin has certainly reaped the rewards of a political landscape dramatically tilted in his favor. The Levada Center, a non-governmental polling organization, reports that Putin’s approval rating is over 80%, a surprising figure and virtually unique among Western politicians, and which represents a substantial increase in his ratings over previous years. to the invasion of Ukraine.
The war gave Putin a nationalist message around which to mobilize Russians, and even as the military campaign faltered over the course of 2023, the war maintained widespread support.
National security is a priority for Russians in the electoral context. Ukrainian attacks on Russian border regions have made war seem close to many inside the country, but support for the invasion – euphemistically called a “special military operation” – remains high.
The Levada Center determined in late 2023 that “rising inflation and rising food prices may have a lasting impact on the mood of Russians,” with an increase in Russians having to cut their spending .
But that doesn’t mean Russians expect the elections to change the direction the country is going. Putin benefits greatly from apathy. So far, in fact, Russians have never witnessed a democratic transfer of power between rival political parties, and expressions of anger against the Kremlin are rare enough to keep much of the population disconnected from politics.
Former Putin speechwriter Abbas Gallyamov told CNN in February that discontent against the president is growing in Russia. Gallyamov said Putin is trying to remove opposition leaders from society to at least ensure that discontent remains “unstructured,” “disorganized” and “leaderless.”
Editor’s note: This article has been updated.
CNN’s Bob Picheta, Anna Chernova, Pauline Lockwood and Mariya Knight contributed reporting.
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