“How much longer will the population, frightened and desperate, let this happen? » asked journalist Anna Politkovskaïa, murdered on October 7, 2006 in the stairwell of her building in Moscow, at the dawn of the Putin regime.
Her assassination made her the first emblematic victim in a long list of opponents liquidated over 18 years – to which has just been added Alexeï Navalny, who died in detention last month. The opponent’s question resonates the day after the presidential election which won Vladimir Putin with 87% of the votes.
He owes his unopposed re-election to a fifth term to a series of “coincidences with multiple causes”, to use the point of view conceived by Leo Tolstoy in War and peace. The score is ridiculously high and is necessarily due to various ballot manipulation techniques. But not only. For 25 years since this regime has been in place, the indifference of the general population to the progressive erosion of freedoms has competed with the fear inspired by its repressive machine. If, moreover, the population “lets it be done”, it is also because the speech of Putin, a strong man and permanent war leader, arouses a degree of real support, although difficult to measure in the absence of a real political opposition. The Kremlin’s propaganda operates, which makes Russia, in a Manichean way, the victim of Western aggression in Ukraine against which it was necessary to take up arms.
If there was nothing democratic about this election, it does not amount to the theater, more or less mocked in the West, of a legitimation enterprise without credibility. The exercise served Putin to unite the population around the indefinite continuation of his “special operation” in Ukraine and the perpetuation of his presidency, which could last until 2036.
By a completely Orwellian method, this election was concretely used by the regime to increase its social control over the population. Voting is not compulsory in Russia, but strongly recommended. Particularly insistent voting operations will have been deployed to put pressure on voters, from retirees to employees of large companies like Aeroflot, whose income depends on the State. By extension, these “exit the vote” operations will have served to whip up the loyalty to the regime of civil servants in the different regions, loyalty according to which budgets and promotions are distributed.
Had it not been for the opposition’s call to vote at a fixed time on Sunday noon, dissenting voices would have been completely invisible. The call was heard in Russia and abroad by Russian youth in exile. If a quarter of a century of hounding and judicial muzzling have for the moment practically extinguished these voices, we should not despair of seeing them one day reorganize and regain a foothold. The regime has become too violent and too controlling not to give the impression that it could collapse at any moment.
This diversion of the electoral system for authoritarian purposes, of which Russia is a convincing example, is practiced by other countries with varying influence on the international scene, such as the Turkey of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, tending to make the State of law a surveillance state. Of the 76 countries where elections will be held this year, 28 do not meet the conditions for a truly democratic vote, according to the index established by The Economist. If Donald Trump is re-elected president in November, there will be a great risk that his re-election will lead to a “Putinization” of American democracy.
A no less worrying reading could be applied next month to another actor whose influence is growing on the world stage: India. Rising power, India, whose voters will in turn go to the polls in April, is another of these democracies in the process of shrinking. Its prime minister, Narendra Modi, who will probably be re-elected for a third term, shares with Vladimir Putin the same desire to centralize and personalize power. With Putin and Trump, he shares the same populism based on victim motives. In the name of an ultra-Hinduist definition of the nation, his government maintains an openly anti-Muslim discourse, has relentlessly attacked the press which stands up to it, has stifled parliamentary opposition and thrown hundreds of students and of human rights activists on the basis of an anti-terrorism law. India is becoming, like Russia, a kind of electoral autocracy. Which Washington turns a blind eye to, by the way, given Modi’s geopolitical usefulness in the rivalry with China. The contradiction is that his grip on political life is incredibly durable, while he is far from having succeeded in solving the serious problem of economic inequality and youth unemployment. Like Putin, he is in the posture of the colossus, but he is a colossus with feet of clay.