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Why does Putin always win? What to know about Russia's pseudo election.

Vladimir Putin is guaranteed to win reelection in Russia. But for the Kremlin, high turnout and a landslide victory remain important.

By Robyn Dixon | 2024-03-14

Russian President Vladimir Putin is seen in 2018 at his inauguration ceremony in Moscow. (Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP)

In a three-day election that leaves no room for doubt, Russian President Vladimir Putin is poised to win a fifth term on Sunday, allowing him to stay in power until 2030 -- and, should he run again, to 2036.

But many analysts believe the 71-year-old autocrat will rule this nation of 146 million people for life.

It was not supposed to be this way. Under Russia's constitution, Putin's term in power was supposed to end in 2008 -- but under a tricky bait-and-switch, he effectively ruled Russia as prime minister for four years, swapping places with Dmitry Medvedev. Putin returned as president in 2012, sparking massive protests that changed nothing.

In 2020, Putin engineered changes to the constitution in a nationwide vote marred by irregularities that allowed him at least two more six-year terms.

Putin has centralized power, invaded Georgia and Ukraine, and destroyed the Russian opposition. The two most charismatic opposition leaders are dead: Boris Nemtsov was gunned down near the Kremlin in 2015, and Alexei Navalny survived a state-ordered poisoning in 2020 but died in prison last month. His widow says he was killed on Putin's direct order. Other opposition figures are either in prison, silenced or have fled the country.

Having cleared the field, the Kremlin responds indignantly to suggestions that Russia's democracy is fake. Last week, Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Moscow would not tolerate such criticisms. "Our democracy is the best and we will continue to build it," he said.

Putin's regime has employed time-honored tricks to manipulate elections, such as orchestrated public clamor for the leader to stay -- like the staged event at the Kremlin on Dec. 8, when Artyom Zhoga, a Ukrainian separatist leader, begged Putin to run again.

Since replacing the retiring Boris Yeltsin 24 years ago, Putin has steadily destroyed democratic institutions, leaving the media, courts, a rubber-stamp parliament and a tame electoral commission under rigid state control. Dissent is crushed. Criticism of the war has been outlawed.

Kremlin-controlled media purvey a fire hose of propaganda to convince Russians that only Putin can guarantee stability. It portrays Russia's invasion of Ukraine as a do-or-die war by NATO against Russia that only Putin can win.

The election takes place over three days, leaving the gate wide open for tampering with ballot boxes. In 27 Russian regions and two in occupied Ukraine, voters can use a widely criticized, opaque online voting system, with no way to verify votes. Golos, an independent election watchdog, has been declared a foreign agent and its leader Grigory Melkonyants is in detention, facing trial.

The use of online voting in several regions during legislative elections in 2021 delivered wins to nine pro-Kremlin candidates who lost in paper balloting.

Government employees and workers in state-controlled enterprises provide a well of Kremlin support, many of them beneficiaries of a closed, corrupt system. To ensure loyalty, they are ordered to show their bosses cellphone photos proving that they voted for the Kremlin's candidates.

Putin meets potential voters during a visit to a greenhouse complex outside Stavropol, Russia, on March 5. (Mikhail Metzel/Sputnik/AP)

For Putin, the purpose of the election is to gain a veneer of legitimacy, allowing him to claim massive support for Russia's war against Ukraine.

With Russian election workers and armed guards knocking on doors and demanding that people vote in occupied Ukraine, the election is also designed to cement Moscow's hold over areas that it claims, illegally, to have annexed in Crimea, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk and Luhansk.

The Russian media has reported that the presidential administration is determined to see a minimum 70 percent turnout and for Putin to win by at least 80 percent, surpassing his record of 76.7 percent in 2018.

This year's election also marks an end to a more rational era, just five years ago in Russia, when even some pro-Kremlin analysts believed Putin would hand power to a successor.

Despite Putin's authoritarian controls, the Kremlin is sensitive to potential risks, mindful of the mass protests in Belarus against President Alexander Lukashenko in 2020, when he clung to power through a manipulated election.

Since 2020, the Kremlin has worked tirelessly to crush dissent, arresting thousands of opposition figures.

Only three candidates -- from Kremlin-friendly parties co-opted to provide a veneer of legitimacy -- have been allowed to run. The regime uses them to divide and fragment any real opposition.

Nikolai Kharitonov, 75, of the Communist Party, is a colorless figure who ran against Putin in 2004 and gained 13 percent of the vote.

Hard-line nationalist Leonid Slutsky, 56, of the Liberal Democratic Party, has called for executing Ukrainian prisoners of war.

Vladislav Davankov, 40, of the New People Party, is a low-profile politician who supports the war and co-authored a law that barred transgender people from changing their gender in documents or receiving gender-affirming medical care.

In a post on social media, Yekaterinburg journalist Dmitry Kolezev, who fled Russia after the war, described the New People Party as a "fake party" planted by the Kremlin.

A February poll by the Levada Center, an independent polling agency, asked Russians to name the politician they trusted: 52 percent named Putin; 3 percent named Slutsky; and Kharitonov and Davankov were each named by 1 percent.

Two antiwar candidates, Yekaterina Duntsova and Boris Nadezhdin, were barred from running after the Central Election Commission found fault with signatures they needed to win a place on the ballot. In 2006, the commission removed the option of voting against all candidates, removing a risk of protest votes.

A poll by the pro-Kremlin, state-owned polling agency VCIOM predicted this week that Putin would win 82 percent of the vote.

Gennady Zyuganov, right, the head of Russia's Communist Party, and Nikolai Kharitonov, center, the party's presidential candidate, attend a wreath-laying ceremony at Stalin's tomb in Moscow on March 5. (Yuri Kochetkov/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)

Putin's main rival, Alexei Navalny, who loomed large in Russian presidential elections, was barred from running against Putin in 2018 and jailed in 2021. He died at the age of 47 in the so-called Polar Wolf prison colony in the Yamalo-Nenets region of northern Russia. Authorities said he died of natural causes and the Kremlin has dismissed allegations that Navalny was killed.

His last political act from prison was a call for supporters to join a subtle protest known as "Noon Against Putin," by arriving en masse at ballot stations at noon Sunday, the last day of voting, to show their rejection of Putin.

"That could be a strong demonstration of national sentiment," a Feb. 1 post on Navalny's social media accounts said. He wrote that there was no way for authorities to stop a protest visible to all.

"Well, what can they do? Will they close the polling stations at noon? Will they organize an action in support of Putin at 10 a.m.? Will they register everyone who came at noon and put them on the list of unreliable people?" he said.

Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta Europe called the protest "Navalny's political testament."

In an utterly predictable election, the one risk to the Kremlin is that voters snub a vote that everyone knows is not in doubt.

Advertisements of unclear authorship popping up on Russian social media use comedy to urge Russians to vote, even though they know Putin will win.

In one ad, clean-cut men dance at a stag party, but instead of a scantily clad woman jumping out of a giant cake, a figure in a plump bee costume emerges. No one voted in a poll beforehand in the stag party group chat, the ad explains, so the organizer made his own choice.

In another ad, a pregnant woman preparing dinner questions her husband about his chores and whether he voted.

"Sunshine, what difference does it make? Will he not get elected without us?" her husband asks. The music turns menacing and she grows furious, warning that they will lose their social payments and throwing him out of the apartment.

Still, the risk of low turnout is quite low. Russia's governors and bosses of state enterprises are tasked with ensuring high participation and cannot afford to fail.


This article was downloaded by calibre from https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/03/14/vladimir-putin-russia-presidential-election/


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