The outcome of the last day of voting was in no doubt: Vladimir Putin was re-elected President of Russia for six more years this Sunday March 17 with more than 87% of the votes, according to initial estimates and the results of a poll. a state institute, Vtsiom.
The figures were published shortly after the last polling stations closed at 7 p.m. French time in the Kaliningrad enclave.
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Invasion of Ukraine, repression in Russia, confrontation with the West: it is as an authoritarian warlord that Vladimir Putin, in power for a quarter of a century, was re-elected as head of the Kremlin on Sunday for a fifth term.
74 arrests in Russia
The detractors of the Russian president, who has been in charge of the country for 24 years, wanted to show themselves by going to vote at the same time, at noon.
But the master of the Kremlin was able to count on very real popularity and wanted to make the presidential election a demonstration of the country's unity.
At the end of the afternoon, national participation stood at 73.33%, a record according to official figures.
Overall, the mobilization of the opposition took place calmly, but the NGO OVD-Info, specializing in monitoring repression, reported at least 74 arrests in Russia for various forms of election protests.
Vladimir Putin, aged 71, faced three hand-picked and insignificant candidates.
The opposition has been decimated by years of repression that accelerated further with the conflict in Ukraine and culminated in the mysterious death of Alexei Navalny in an Arctic prison in February.
Reform of the Constitution in 2020
The Russian leader, who had the Constitution reformed in 2020 to be able to remain in charge of the country until 2036, has already served four terms (two of four years, two others of six years), interrupted by an interlude as prime minister.
Over the years, the vertical of power established by Vladimir Putin, from the Soviet KGB and arriving in the Kremlin on December 31, 1999, has revealed two major characteristics of his regime.
The first, that of a constant hardening with first the bringing into line of the oligarchs, the second Chechen war, the stifling of public freedoms, of the media and of the opposition.
Second characteristic: a quest for geopolitical power, with the war in Georgia (2008), the annexation of Ukrainian Crimea (2014), the military intervention in Syria (2015), and the invasion of Ukraine (2022) .