0.3 percentage points: Putin's poll numbers are hardly falling - but Ukraine is worrying Russians
Created: 05/11/2022 06:17
By: Florian Naumann
Kremlin boss Vladimir Putin and Dmitri Medvedev in an intimate conversation in Moscow.
(Archive image) © Maxim Shipenkov/dpa
State polls show that Vladimir Putin is very popular in Russia.
what's up
An independent institute also sees the head of the Kremlin on the upswing.
Munich/Moscow - It's a question that occupies the West - but can hardly be answered: Do the people in Russia really support Vladimir Putin's policies and the Ukraine war?
A new survey from Russia shows at least that the country sticks to this view.
Independent surveys only partially put the picture into perspective.
According to a survey by the state-run All-Russian Center for Research on Public Opinion, Putin has recently lost popularity.
However, we are talking about 0.3 percentage points.
The value fell from 80.4 to 80.1 percent in the past week, the state-owned news agency Tass reported on Friday (November 4).
Russia: Putin's poll numbers fall only slightly - independent institute sees similar result
According to the report, the state survey showed lower values for other important actors: Putin's United Russia party was 40.3 percent popular.
Trust in the government as a whole was expressed by 50.3 percent of those surveyed – that is, an extremely narrow absolute majority of the survey participants.
The extent to which the polls can be trusted is an open question.
However, the independent institute Levada, which Putin's government has branded as a "foreign agent", published similar figures on November 1: 79 percent of those surveyed backed Putin's government actions in October, it said.
In September, the month of the Russian partial mobilization, the approval ratings were lower, according to Levada.
At the time, pollsters measured 77 percent support for Putin – after 83 percent in the previous month.
According to the
Moscow Times
portal , this was the biggest drop in polls for the Kremlin chief since raising the retirement age in 2018 sparked nationwide protests.
Ukraine War Poll: Russians Support Putin - But Apparently Increasingly Concerned
But the situation for Putin is obviously not entirely positive.
The Levada Institute also regularly surveys the attitudes of the population in Russia towards the Ukraine war.
The most recent result: In October, according to the data, 58 percent of Russians were "very worried" about the situation in Ukraine - the highest value measured so far.
Only 11 percent of those surveyed said they were “not overly concerned” or “not at all concerned”.
However, 73 percent of the survey participants supported “the actions of the Russian military in Ukraine” in general or completely.
Recently, however, Putin, in cooperation with the new key figures Ramzan Kadyrov and Yevgeny Prigozhin, shifted responsibility to individual military officials.
A senior troop representative had to resign;
TV propagandist Vladimir Solovyov railed against "bastards" who had spread misinformation, as reported by
fr.de
, among others .
Russia polls: How secure is Putin in the saddle?
Volkov sees "abyss" in the country
Russian opposition figures like Leonid Volkov, a confidante of Alexei Navalny, generally view the polls from Russia with skepticism.
From its own survey work, however, Navalny's organization often assessed trust in Putin only slightly lower than officially reported.
According to state pollsters, Putin's popularity after the annexation of Crimea was 86 percent.
“In our own surveys we never got this high value, but it probably actually reached around 80 percent,” writes Volkov in his book “Putinland”, which was recently published in German.
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The Putin critic attributes this situation essentially to the effects of the Russian media landscape.
“We saw that there is not one Russia, but two: a Russia of television and a Russia of the Internet.
In between there is a huge, one could say dizzyingly deep abyss.” In the past few weeks in particular, Russian state TV has repeatedly heard threats and accusations, some of them drastic, directed at Ukraine and the West.
However, since the beginning of the war, the Russian government has once again pushed back on independent media.
Again and again, Putin addresses his speeches more or less directly to listeners in the West.
A survey in Germany on Thursday showed growing support for theses and theories from the Kremlin in the Federal Republic as well - the head of the study attested a "disturbing" development.
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