The Russian presidential election, which is being held between March 15 and 17 this year, is preparing to confirm a single certainty: the strong man of the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin, will emerge as the big winner from this “theatrical ballot” staged by all means. pieces on “democratic rhetoric” to better support its “anti-democratic intentions”, in the words of Russologist Angela Stent, author of the essay Putin’s World (Putin’s world).
A perfectly oiled and relentless mechanism that the dictator has been refining for more than two decades and which should be brought to its climax once again in 2024 to keep him in power for a long time to come. Decryption.
Fraud at the ballot box
The September 2021 legislative election in Russia not only established the domination of Vladimir Putin’s party, United Russia, over the Duma, the lower house of the Russian legislative power. He then won 324 of the 450 seats at stake.
The vote was also marked by numerous irregularities and manipulation of the results, mathematically highlighted by Golos group researchers Dmitry Kobak and Sergey Shpilkin. In the end, according to them, the stratagem would have produced an abnormally high participation rate and increased by 20 points the vote cast in favor of candidates in the Kremlin’s pay, all thanks to 14 million ballots deemed fraudulent.
“Russian elections are not designed to give citizens the free choice between different candidates representing diverse political opinions,” summarizes Brian Taylor, Russia specialist, joined by The duty at Syracuse University in New York State. Above all, they serve to remind everyone, elites and masses alike, that there is no replacement option for Putin,” and this, without skimping on the means to get there.
The day after the previous elections, the broadcast of images of voters being driven by particularly well-organized drivers from one polling station to another to deposit several ballots largely illustrated the compromise of the electoral process in a country where all the authorities Government agencies, including those that should be independent, are subject to the dictates of the Kremlin.
Creative and imaginative, Vladimir Putin’s regime is also taking steps to maintain the illusions: by bringing the ballot boxes, protected by intimidating and often armed squads, to private residences, to force the vote of the recalcitrant; holding the vote for three days, rather than one, to make it more difficult to monitor; by implementing electronic voting with a servile architecture; by holding elections in the occupied territories of Ukraine, where the authorities are taking advantage of the chaos to invent the figures that Moscow wants to hear…
The pressure is also very strong on state employees, at all levels, and on workers in public companies, forced to vote using significant means of control. All over the country.
“In this autocracy, elections are not just a way of publicly claiming Putin’s legitimacy,” said Paul Goode, Chair of Russian Studies at Carleton University, in an interview. They also provide an opportunity to verify the performance of government officials in shaping the vote for Putin, which then has an impact on regional budgets and government appointments. »
A performance for which the Kremlin has already established the measure, moreover: Moscow expects a participation rate exceeding 70%, for 80% of the votes cast in favor of the dictator, in order to exceed the results of 2018. More two thirds of voters then went to the polls to choose Vladimir Putin in a proportion of 76.7%.
Handling of masses
The overwhelming victory of Vladimir Putin should, as in the previous presidential election, be played out while the main person concerned will ultimately have never held a campaign rally or presented an electoral program other than the speech he delivered to the Duma in last February. He attacked the West while promising tax cuts and major investments, worth billions of rubles, to restore Russia to its former greatness.
No need for more for the dictator who, last November, a month before formalizing his candidacy, could boast of a dizzying popularity rating established at 85% by the Levada Center, an independent Russian polling institute generally judged reliable. In February, 75% of Russians even believed that the country was moving in the right direction, even though for two years it had been placed by Vladimir Putin in an endless war in Ukraine which would have killed and injured more than 355,000 of its young citizens, according to the assessment established by the American intelligence services.
But the subject of war, other than in its conquering, liberating and Nazifying narrative imposed by the regime, is far from dominating the electoral environment, cleared, as the election approaches, of its dissident voices. The strongest, that of the opponent Alexeï Navalny, died on February 16 in strange conditions in a penal colony in the Arctic Circle where he was imprisoned.
The man, despite his detention, regularly managed to put his grain of sand in the cogs of the propaganda that the Kremlin deploys to keep voters in a parallel reality, like that presented since November in the VDNKh park, in the north of Moscow . A national and patriotic exhibition entitled Russia took place there as the first round of the presidential election approached. By April 12, several million Russians and tourists should have attended this large-scale gathering where stands, highly technological installations and shows promote Russian heritage in all its regions, including those annexed. It is a question of “showing Russians the true modern Russia, a country of which we can and of which we must be proud”, indicates the communication plan of the exhibition, which is located in the very place where, in 1939, the Stalin regime inaugurated this park to promote the greatness and diversity of the USSR.
With Putin’s victory assured, the presidential vote could suffer from a lack of interest, something the Kremlin seeks to combat without limiting means. The Estonian site Delfi revealed, a few weeks ago, that the outgoing president had bet big on Sergei Kirienko, the great architect of Putin’s domestic policy. The man nicknamed the “viceroy of Donbass” is said to have spent more than a billion dollars to motivate and direct the limited choice of voters towards the dictator in place through the creation and support of content such as films, television series or video games filled with pro-government and anti-Western messages.
On the airwaves of state television, propaganda has been heard for weeks in a message which repeatedly challenges voters by asking them: “Who ensures development? Who guarantees stability? Who unites us? Who do you trust? » Before imposing a single image, that of the president.
Violence against opposition
Chance or coincidence? Tuesday evening, one of the relatives of the late Russian dissident Alexei Navalny, Leonid Volkov, was attacked with a hammer in front of his home in Vilnius, Lithuania, a gesture signed by the Kremlin, he denounced online, to make silence, according to him, the Russian opposition and prevent it from influencing the presidential election this weekend.
The attacker is still at large, the investigation continues, but the facts tend to support the theory of the victim – who escaped with a broken arm – who would not be the first nor the last to suffer the violence of the regime aimed at ensuring the persistence of the dictator at the top of the state.
“Putin has spent the last 25 years building a personalist dictatorship in which no alternatives to his power are allowed to emerge to challenge him,” says political scientist Brian Taylor. And this impacts all ballots, which exclude genuine opposition candidates and only allow in those who run against Putin without actually trying to challenge his power and policies. »
The independent Boris Nadezhdine, a critical voice opposed to Vladimir Putin’s war of invasion in Ukraine, paid the price in early February when his candidacy was rejected by the Central Electoral Commission. The CEC assured that it had found 15% of “erroneous signatures” among those submitted by this discreet veteran of the Russian political scene to support his approach, or three times more than the authorized margin of error.
His expulsion contributes to making this presidential election the least pluralist of the Putin years and seals the rejection of any so-called “liberal” opposition in Russia, an opposition that the Kremlin strongman fears even more since 2018. That year, the presence on Pavel Groudinin’s ballots had diminished his victory, the populism of this leader of the Communist Party having unexpectedly succeeded in taking 10% of the votes away from the outgoing president.
“Vladimir Putin needs a perfectly staged victory that will help demoralize and demobilize the opposition against him,” says Russia specialist Paul Goode. A production with its three extras: Leonid Sloutski, Vladislav Davankov and Nikolai Kharitonov, the only candidates authorized to have their names appear on the ballot papers, not to cross swords with the dictator during this presidential election, but to support in this further stage in a long political career which is still far from coming to an end.
In 2020, Vladimir Putin passed a constitutional reform which should allow him to remain in the Kremlin until 2036, which would technically make him beat Joseph Stalin’s longevity record at the head of the country.