With Navalny jailed, opponents persecuted and app banned, Putin intends to consolidate his power

Two days of voting, a worried autocrat, widespread disinterest and successful lobbying against Big Tech. The Russian parliamentary elections, which began on Friday and end tomorrow Sunday, are one of the strangest Russia has seen in a long history of difficult elections. The ruling party of President Vladimir Putin, United Russia, has waged a merciless struggle to retain its absolute majority in the Duma. The biggest obstacle is not an opponent, but indifference. The state-owned Russian Public Opinion Research Center records a historic low of 29% of voters. Putin’s party is still well ahead of second in the polls, the Communist Party, with nearly 17%, but should get a much lower percentage of votes than in 2016, when he won 343 of the Duma’s 450 seats.

A few hours before the opening of the polling centers Putin managed to twist the arm of the opposition. The giants of technology, Apple and Google finally gave in to pressure from the Kremlin for the virtual shops of the two companies to remove the “Smart Vote” application that had been launched The imprisoned dissident Alexei Navalny so that his supporters can detect who is the candidate best placed to defeat the representative of United Russia in each of the constituencies of this huge country. This, whatever the party or the sector to which he belongs. For Putin, Navalny remains his biggest rival to beat after surviving poisoning and the severe confinement he still finds himself in.

Of course, Navalny and his support group aren’t the only dissidents who find themselves with no better luck in this election. Oksana Pushkina, the only progressive MP who spent her last term in the Duma campaigning for women’s rights and legislating against domestic violence, did not come forward. He was the target of a relentless harassment campaign which he could not resist. In her constituency, she has been replaced by a nationalist, pro-Putin singer, who, barring a huge surprise, will win the seat of Pushkin.

United Russia has put together its celebrity lists in an effort to shatter widespread apathy. One of them is Maria Butina, who became famous for her relationship with the National Rifle Association of the United States Before the 2016 presidential election, she spent several months in a US prison for failing to register as a foreign agent and was deported to Russia.

Putin appealed to his best letter again, nationalism, to attract voters. The last act of campaigning took place on Russia’s northwest border with Europe. There, he unveiled a 20-meter-high, 50-ton statue of knights with swords under waving banners preparing to repel invaders from the west. The message could not be clearer: this is the maximum point at which European influence can go.

At the event, flanked by the Orthodox Patriarch and a bishop who would be his spiritual advisor, Putin described how medieval Prince Alexander Nevsky laid the groundwork for a “strong and centralized Russian state” by pushing back the Teutonic Knights in a battle on the ice. “Nothing can break the sacred continuity of time and generations”, Putin said. It is the same slogan that the official candidates used in their local campaigns.

Nationalism may merge, but Russians are more concerned with rising food prices and falling real incomes, so “the elections have become a key test of Russia’s increasingly authoritarian system before Putin’s current mandate expires in 2024 ”, describes the Financial Times correspondent. The Kremlin has promised to distribute $ 7,000 million in aid among party bases if a victory is achieved. He already did. And it started with a special bonus of 15,000 rubles (about $ 205) for soldiers and policeas well as others 10,000 rubles for pensioners and parents of school-age children.

During the campaign, opponents faced unprecedented persecution and fiery rhetoric about the danger of foreigners meddling in the country’s internal affairs. In this context, Putin accused American technology companies of “interfering in Russian affairs” and threatened to withdraw them from the important Russian market. The president’s primary objective, analysts say, is to demonstrate that “There can be no alternative to his leadership.” Last year, Putin amended the Constitution to allow him extend his term potentially until 2036, although he did not say if he intended to appear again.

“Putin needs personal confirmation of his mandate and lack of alternatives to himthe. The elections are a new opportunity for him to convince himself that the people continue to support him, ”explains Tatiana Stanovaya, founder of the Moscow political consultancy firm R. Politik. “He needs the elections to strengthen his power and let the elite know that he is the only figure who can support the whole system and that has the monopoly to decide when to transfer power and who will be the successor ”, Stanovaya adds.

Liberal opposition led by Navalny believed the Duma elections would kick off a process that end the monopoly of United Russia and Putin’s authoritarianism. They were motivated by winning municipal elections in Siberia last year. But the arrest of Navalny in January, on his return from Germany where he was treated for poisoning with nerve agents by state agents, broken hopes. Several candidates were barred from running due to their ties to Navalny after a court ruled in June that their Anti-Corruption Foundation was an “extremist” organization. The others were subjected to a series of maneuvers ranging from discrediting to putting forward candidates of the same name to invalidate the votes. “Navalny was causing trouble, even though he wasn’t a real electoral threat. Corn the Kremlin cannot have so many people protesting in the street“A man close to Putin told the London Daily Mail.

Other dissidents like Ivan Pavlov, a lawyer who legally defended Navalny’s organization, had to travel to Georgia to avoid ending up in prison. Pavlov’s legal aid group was disbanded in July after Russia banned its website on the grounds that had published information from an “unwanted” Czech organization.

The crackdown has also spread to independent media and NGOs like Golos, the election observer whose widespread fraud reports helped spark large protests against Putin’s return to the Kremlin in 2011, when Navalny urged his supporters to vote against United Russia’s “thieves and villains”. And the repression is not only in Moscow, it is also happening thousands of kilometers away. When dissident activist Violetta Grudina from the arctic port city of Murmansk told close friends that she was considering running for municipal elections, Posters appeared all over town accusing him of “perverting children.” When, he decided to keep his candidacy beyond the dirty campaign, a tribunal ordered Grudina to isolate herself to receive treatment for the coronavirus, despite the fact that she had already recovered from a mild case of Covid-19 and had a certificate of negativity in the virus tests. Grudina went on a hunger strike and the judges ended up giving her a medical discharge, just in time to present her documents, but she was nonetheless removed from the list of candidates due to her ties to Navalny.

The opposition hoped that their “smart voting” strategy it will lead to obtaining a seat in Parliament for a dozen opposition politicians. “One of the goals of the smart voting campaign is to get people to the polls so they know what to do when there are no real opposition candidates,” explained Grigorii Golosov of the European University of Saint Petersburg. “If you vote for a candidate suggested by smart voting in your constituency, then they will certainly not vote for United Russia on the party line. And in the party line, every percentage counts ”. More than half of the 225 elected by the app before its censorship – including 11 of the 15 candidates in Moscow, where the opposition presence is strongest – are Communists, indicating their likely role as a source of discontent. Obviously the PC is incorrigible and accuses Navalny and his group of being “mere puppets of the CIA”.

Now with the removal of the app from the Google and Apple stores, the goal of dissent seems unattainable. Since 2016, no member of the “non-systemic” opposition – that is, not affiliated with the ruling party or its allies beyond criticizing Putin – has held a 450-seat position in the Duma. .

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