The presidential elections that Russia holds between this Friday and Sunday present a bleak panorama for its electorate: never before has Vladimir Putin, who will extend his mandate until 2030, faced so few candidates, and his three supposed adversaries unconditionally support the Kremlin.
In addition, they will be the first presidential elections with the opaque online voting system, and observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) will not be present.
The Kremlin's objective is to turn the elections into a plebiscite, a demonstration of massive support, with which Putin can justify to his people the harsh measures he adopts in the future.
Of the 25 parties allowed in Russia, only eight, including the president's, have dared to present a candidate.
The presidential filter has been inflexible.
Only three formations loyal to power (the Communist Party, the Liberal-Democratic Party of Russia and New People) managed to make the cut.
For its part, the country's largest party, United Russia, did not nominate anyone from its organization, but rather the “independent” candidate Vladimir Putin.
The president has strengthened himself in power in the six years that have passed since the previous presidential elections in 2018. With his constitutional reform of 2020, he zeroed out all his accumulated mandates since 2000 and can remain in the Kremlin until 2036. The laws enacted This legislature and the prison cells have removed from the electoral race any candidate that the presidential administration considers dangerous to its plans.
“And yet, the Kremlin is afraid to register a liberal candidate,” Stanislav Andreichuk, a member of the board of directors of Golos, the largest Russian independent organization for electoral transparency, emphasizes to this newspaper.
“It is the smallest number of presidential candidates in the entire history of Russian elections, only equaled by 2008, when Dmitri Medvedev took turns with Putin,” the activist emphasizes.
The visible heads of the Russian opposition are in prison, in exile or have died.
One of the dissident leaders, Alexei Navalny, died suddenly in prison one month before the elections.
His funeral drew tens of thousands of Russians despite the Kremlin's boycott and the arrests of hundreds of peaceful protesters after his strange death.
Banned candidates
Without references, the population critical of the Government clings to any nail to show their discontent.
For this reason, the Central Electoral Commission of Russia has vetoed two candidates who mobilized huge queues of people willing to sign to endorse their candidacy.
Political scientist Boris Nadezhdin, supposedly opposed to the war although he participates in the Kremlin's propaganda media, collected some 300,000 signatures, but the electoral board annulled enough to ban him from participating.
Something similar happened to journalist Yekaterina Duntsova, arrested when she was presenting a new party in January.
The Yábloko opposition party turned 30 in October.
He has not been able to present a candidate, but he still maintains his struggle within the system, in city councils and regional assemblies, with the motto “for peace and freedom.”
“Classical politics, fighting against the decisions of the authorities in elections, is prohibited, it is practically impossible.
But it is possible to fight for ideas, for the souls of people,” the president of the party, Nikolai Ribakov, responds to EL PAÍS.
“With our activity we demonstrate that there are a significant number of Russians who support peace and freedom, and it is important to preserve hope for a better, peaceful future.
If this is not done now, it cannot be done in the future,” says Ribakov.
These will be the second Russian elections – the first presidential – since 1993 without an OSCE observer mission.
As in the pseudo-referendums on the annexation of the occupied Ukrainian territories in 2022, the Kremlin will bring its own “international observers”, some of them Spanish citizens, to pretend that they have been the cleanest elections in the world.
I vote online under the watchful eye of the boss
Furthermore, this time the authorities have launched the controversial electronic voting in 27 electoral points, most of them problematic areas for Putin's re-election, including his two cosmopolitan metropolises, Moscow and Saint Petersburg.
In the 2021 local elections, the president's party lost in several districts of the capital when the counting of physical ballots finished.
At dawn, after a “scrutiny” of more than 15 hours of the votes online, the two million electronic votes that fell into the system gave an overwhelming victory to United Russia.
Golos denounces that it is an absolutely opaque system because only the final figures are visible on a screen, but access to the code is restricted to Kremlin computer scientists.
Furthermore, with this method it is easier to check whether the citizen has voted as the authorities wish.
“If your boss requires you to vote, but you do so with a ballot at a traditional polling station, no one can control who you voted for.
With online voting we do not have that certainty,” says Andreichuk.
Additionally, most electronic votes hit the system on Friday mornings, “just when people are at work with their bosses behind them.”
The other alternative that the Kremlin has to force its population to vote is an application designed by United Russia (GEO-SMS) so that public employees can certify with the geolocation of their phone that they went to the ballot box that corresponds to them.
This coercion is unconstitutional, because not voting is also a political option.
Another controversial aspect of the elections is their holding in the occupied territories, including Crimea.
The international community does not recognize its annexation - not even China -, a large part of the population has fled their homes and fear is present in many houses, due to the bombs and the Russian security forces.
“In addition, the organization of the elections in these territories contradicts Russian legislation,” points out the member of Golos, who gives as an example that there you can go to the polls without a Russian passport and show the Ukrainian one or that of the “popular republics.” ” from Donetsk and Lugansk.
“The electoral commissions in these areas have been formed without party representatives and there are practically no observers,” he adds.
The European Platform for Democratic Elections (EPDE) calls on the international community not to recognize the elections because they took place on occupied land.
“Five million voters in these territories are forced to participate in the elections, approximately 4.8% of the total voters,” the organization emphasizes.
A very high percentage: as a comparison, the Russian central electoral commission vetoes candidates if it considers that 5% of the signatures they present to run have – in its eyes – some type of irregularity.
Electoral researcher Sergei Shpilkin – declared a foreign agent by the Kremlin – published in 2008 a system to estimate the number of fraudulent votes in Russian elections.
According to their calculations, in all the elections held since then, including the legislative ones, there were between 10 and 15 million irregular votes, although in 2020, thanks to the restrictions applied by the coronavirus pandemic, this figure shot up to over 25. millions of ballots.
Also striking is the contradiction between the authorities' efforts to promote high participation in Putin's "plebiscite", both with remote control systems with millions of gifts and free tickets to events for voting, while at the same time encouraging disinterest in the candidates.
The Russian president has not attended any electoral debate, where the central issue was the West and not the Kremlin, and as the elections have approached, federal television has dedicated minimal space to his "rivals."
According to Golos, the Communist Party candidate received 17 minutes in total from the six national channels over the course of a full week, while the other two candidates received less than 10 minutes.
Putin, the eternal president, appeared exultant at all hours on the screens of Russian homes.
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