Russia holds first elections since Ukraine invasion, but opposition is mostly absent
Russians on Friday began voting in the first nationwide elections since the invasion of Ukraine in a climate of wartime censorship and repression, with the Kremlin trying to assure the public that it was business as usual.
The vote for local and regional governments across the country includes the first municipal-level elections in the capital of Moscow since 2017, when the opposition won a sizeable minority of seats despite the Kremlin’s dominance of the political system and accusations of fraud.
But the ranks of the opposition have since been depleted even further. Many anti-government politicians have fled the country, while others have been arrested or blocked from running by the election commissions.
“Real competition this year is at one of the lowest rates in a decade,” according to an assessment by Golos, a Russian independent elections watchdog.
Although President Vladimir Putin has dominated Russian politics for two decades, he has long relied on elections with a semblance of competition to try to legitimise the rule of his United Russia party.
And although those elections were rife with fraud, the vote-counting process in major cities such as Moscow retained a modicum of transparency, making them an opportunity for Kremlin critics to express their discontent even if a major opposition victory was virtually impossible.
After the upheaval in Russia’s economy from international sanctions over the Ukraine war and inflation, the question is whether that logic still holds. Putin has done everything in his power, critics say, to prevent his opponents from being able to repeat even their modest success of five years ago.
“Finally, for the first time, elections are totally senseless,” said Andrei Kolesnikov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace based in Moscow. Almost no one is allowed to participate, he added, referring to the opposition.
The election is also a test, albeit a diluted one, of jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s ability to influence Russian politics from prison.
Navalny’s exiled team of advisers recommended candidates in each of Moscow’s electoral districts to try to defeat the Kremlin’s preferred candidates; a campaign they call “smart voting.”
The current elections are being held on Friday, Saturday and Sunday; a schedule that Kremlin opponents say makes the vote more vulnerable to fraud because election observers are hard-pressed to monitor the polls for the entire duration.
The government is also allowing people to vote online, making it easier to falsify ballots, according to critics.
Nearly all regions of the country are choosing either municipal representatives, regional lawmakers or governors or some combination of those offices.
Russia has for years cracked down on opposition movements and restricted the space for anti-Kremlin candidates on the national political stage. So, opposition leaders have sought smaller roles in local and regional governments where they could still make a difference.
But officials have gone to great lengths to block opposition candidates by imprisoning them on accusations of disseminating false information about the Ukraine war or charging them with minor offences that prohibit them from running.
Despite the Russian authorities’ crackdown on the opposition, some low-profile critics of the Kremlin and of the Ukraine war remain on the ballot. And although they are unlikely to win, Navalny’s advisers said they believe the Kremlin would be hard-pressed to paper over a strong showing by some of them that would convey disapproval of the war.