‘There are no decent parties left’: Sham elections underscore Putin’s grip on Russia

Por Daria Zakharova — POLITICOPolitics » POLITICO

Russia is holding its first parliamentary elections this weekend since the start of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 — a vote that sees the opposition scrambling to give voters options in a field increasingly narrowed by the Kremlin.

The shadow of the war looms large over proceedings. As Ukraine intensified strikes on Russian territory and showed greater tolerance for civilian casualties, Russia’s Supreme Court in August barred Yabloko — the country’s only openly anti-war party — from fielding a national list of candidates in the State Duma, Russia’s lower house.

And with dissenting voices all but reduced to silence, some opposition figures — including Yulia Navalnaya, widow of Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny — are asking Russians to vote for candidates who seem at least neutral on the war.

But other opponents of the Kremlin say Navalnaya’s strategy is giving credibility to sham elections that are only held to justify Russian President Vladimir Putin’s maximalist war against Ukraine and tighten his grip on Russian society.

“To whoever comes to us with a sword — do not expect mercy,” Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in a campaign ad for Putin’s United Russia party, alongside NHL superstar Alex Ovechkin and the propagandist Margarita Simonyan, who runs the state broadcaster RT.

Putin’s veterans

The Kremlin’s response to the opposition suggests it is worried that people are growing tired of the war.

By removing anti-war candidates from the ballot and promoting pro-war voices, Moscow seeks to overstate public support for the invasion of Ukraine, says Ivan Preobrazhensky, a Russian political scientist based in Prague. “By electing them, people are effectively endorsing the policies of the ruling party and the government,” he told POLITICO, even though voters have no real alternative.

Yabloko received between 1% and 2% of votes in previous parliamentary elections and was seen as “politically dead” by the Kremlin, according to Maxim Reznik, a former party leader in St. Petersburg. By allowing it to run, Reznik said, the Kremlin “wanted to show that just 1.5% of Russians oppose war.”

But reports in Russian media suggested that Yabloko’s recent positioning as “the only peace party,” as well as its advocacy for an immediate ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine, had boosted its electoral support. The Nezavisimaya Gazeta reported on a July poll from an unnamed agency giving Yabloko a rating of 9.4%. Faridaily, an outlet founded by independent journalist Farida Rustamova, reported that internal government polling put the party around 5.5%.

A month later, the party’s deputy chairman Lev Shlosberg was sentenced to 11 years in prison for “discrediting” Russia’s army, and the party’s registration was canceled by the Supreme Court a month later after bizarre proceedings over alleged copyright violations.

Although some Yabloko candidates are allowed to compete in single-member constituencies, the ruling lets pro-war politicians fully retain the overwhelming grip they have on the Duma.

“There are no decent parties left,” said Maxim Katz, a former municipal councilor in Moscow’s Shchukino district who later ran campaigns for key opposition figures including Navalny and is now living in exile. “They’re all giving Nazi salutes and telling how great the war is,” he told POLITICO.

Ten parties are running lists in the elections, including Putin’s United Russia party, the Communist Party, the nationalist Liberal-Democratic Party, Fair Russia and New People. Members of these five political movements unanimously backed the Kremlin’s annexation of Ukraine’s eastern regions and their inclusion into Russian territory, and have been echoing Moscow’s pro-war rhetoric.

In place of Yabloko’s ousted candidates, the Kremlin has promoted its own alternatives. More than a thousand Russian veterans of the war in Ukraine will be running — one of whom, Eduard Shonov, allegedly served in a brigade that occupied the Ukrainian town of Bucha, where Russian forces massacred several hundred civilians at the beginning of the war.

For Russians, the war is no longer a distant reality. Recent Ukrainian strikes against Russian cities and infrastructure have caused fuel shortages and made people fearful of attacks. For a large part of the country that agreed to ignore the war as long as it “did not concern them,” the consensus expired “as soon as drones started hitting their cities,” Preobrazhensky said.

‘Smart voting’

The Russian opposition is still seeking to make its voice heard in an increasingly repressive environment.

Navalnaya called the upcoming elections a “propagandistic exercise” for Putin, and believes it is essential to prevent him from getting results that will legitimize his war effort in Russia and in the West.

“Our task is to convey to the majority of Russians — the anti-war majority — that, despite total censorship, fear, and repression, these ‘elections’ represent literally the last opportunity to safely express protest against the policies of Putin and his United Russia party,” she told POLITICO.

Navalnaya and Katz advocate for what they call “smart voting” — an endorsement strategy to defeat United Russia by backing candidates who are against, or at least less supportive of the war. The strategy was pioneered by Alexey Navalny himself in 2018 after he and his allies were mainly barred from running in presidential and municipal elections.

“Smart voting” relies heavily on Yabloko candidates running in single-member districts, but as they are not present in many parts of Russia, some of Navalnaya and Katz’s endorsements include candidates from the Communists and other pro-governmental parties.

This approach has been criticized by some members of the Russian opposition, including the head of Yabloko, Nikolay Rybakov. Voting for parties who are already in the Duma amounts to “supporting those who send members of Yabloko to prison,” he said at a meeting with party supporters in St. Petersburg on September 15.

Endorsing candidates is “the wrong bet,” Reznik, the former Yabloko official, told POLITICO. “The voting results are in the Kremlin’s hands. They’ll rewrite everything anyway. Just you wait and see.”

Fonte: POLITICOPolitics » POLITICO