Putin’s electoral theatre: Past, present and future

On 8-10 September 2023, Russia held local elections in two dozen different regions. The Kremlin could easily have canceled them by declaring martial law. Instead, elections were held in the newly occupied areas of Ukraine despite martial law being declared there. This suggests that Putin’s regime still finds sham elections useful and does not fear any unintended consequences from conducting them.

Elections (or, more precisely, an elaborate piece of political theatre called ‘elections’) remain part of the political system in post-invasion Russia despite myriad political, economic and social changes after 24 February 2022. But what is the role and substance of Russia’s electoral theatre in the new conditions dictated by the war?

In this essay, the author provides a brief history of elections in post-Soviet Russia, explores the latest example of the Kremlin’s sham democracy and sketches the prospects of political changes, focusing on the potential role of elections in them.

From the 1990s to Today: Neither Free nor Fair

The electoral process in post-Soviet Russia has always been flawed. Some regional leaders, such as Tatarstan’s Mintimer Shaimiev and Bashkortostan’s Murtaza Rakhmimov, subverted the democratic norms in their republics already in the 1990s, while in other regions the elections were more honest. Overall, Russia in the 1990s was a flawed (or ‘unconsolidated’, in the political science parlance) democracy, although on the regional level, some local regimes could only be characterized as authoritarian. In the 2000s, Putin’s Kremlin created a giant political machine covering the whole country, a complex and costly mechanism designed to ensure the electoral results favorable to the regime. In the process, local authoritarianisms were integrated into the national authoritarian system and local democracies were to a large extent hollowed out, turning into cogs in the machine of dictatorship.

The ‘menu of manipulation’ in Putin’s Russia includes persecution and harassment of independent candidates, clientelistic practices (vote buying in various forms), administrative mobilization of the vote (forcing state employees to vote for Putin and United Russia en masse) and, finally, electoral fraud. By the mid-2000s, the process of regime consolidation was complete and elections ceased to be a meaningful practice of democratic representation. Putin’s Russia joined the ranks of electoral authoritarian regimes around the world, that is, dictatorships that allowed elections but did not allow them to threaten the ruling clique in any way.

Electoral authoritarian regimes are now the most common form of authoritarianism. Dictators everywhere have concluded that a democratic façade brings significant benefits: it creates the impression of the regime’s overwhelming popularity, a feeling that no alternative is viable. The ease with which the authorities ensure landslide victories, along with targeted repressions, demoralizes the regime’s opponents, while some limited and managed competition allows the population to ‘blow off steam’ with no real consequences for the powers-that-be. Moreover, for the political upstarts loyal to the regime, rigged elections can be a source of vertical mobility, helping the dictator manage his clique. Elections can also reveal deeply unpopular figures on the local level, turning into a source of valuable information for the regime. For over 20 years, Russia has been an important example of electoral authoritarianism studied carefully by many political scientists.

However, electoral authoritarian regimes are not all the same. At one end of the spectrum, there are borderline cases such as Venezuela where elections are indeed rigged, and yet the incumbent president may have only a slight lead over an opposition candidate, and the opposition parties can even win the majority of seats in the parliament. At the other end, there are so-called ‘hegemonic’ regimes such as Kazakhstan where elections with multiple candidates do happen, but the incumbent leader wins by an outlandish margin (in the 2015 presidential race, Nursultan Nazarbaev won with 97,75% of the vote). In the more competitive variants of electoral authoritarianism, elites and ordinary people may try to organize against the regime, using the elections as a focal point. In that case, the regime either democratizes or moves in the ‘hegemonic’ direction, manipulating the electoral process to such an extent that it loses even the superficial semblance of democracy.

In Russia, the latter scenario has taken place in the last few years. Elections turned into a headache for the Kremlin in 2011-2012 when they led to the emergence of a mass movement protesting electoral fraud, and again in 2018-2019, when Alexei Navalny’s team developed a clever strategic voting scheme (so-called ‘smart voting’Read Term in glossary) that made a visible dent in the Kremlin’s results. In response to these challenges, the regime tightened the screws, ramping up repression against opposition activists and independent media. 2021 in particular was a dark year for the opposition, with all of its organizational bases, such as Navalny’s movement, outlawed and crushed by the police. The regime’s increasingly closed nature had an electoral dimension as well: the 2020 vote on the constitutional amendments that allowed Putin to run for president in 2024 was the most rigged electoral event in Russia’s entire post-Soviet history, with the authorities using any and all available means to ensure 75% support for the amendments. It is in this state that Putin’s regime unleashed a war on Ukraine on 24 February 2022.

War-time Electoral Theatre: Was There Anything Special About the 2023 Regional Elections?

One of the often discussed issues concerning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is Putin’s domestic considerations: Could it be that he started the war to secure an even tighter hold on power in Russia itself? The war did give the Kremlin a convenient pretext to finally criminalize any expression of dissent regardless of its form. Hundreds of thousands of opposition-minded citizens were pushed out of the country. The elites also faced a test of loyalty, either leaving Russia (and their domestic assets) or becoming even more subservient to Putin and dependent on his will.

However, by February 2022, all organized sources of dissent had already been suppressed. The Kremlin did not need the war to establish tighter control over domestic politics – on the contrary, its previous repressive actions allowed it to easily crush the anti-war movement that emerged in February-March 2022. So, it could be the other way around: Putin neutralized all opposition in 2021 precisely in order to launch the invasion without any domestic interference. His reasons for starting the war were imperialist, not domestically-oriented.

Electoral campaigns in 2022 and 2023 support the latter hypothesis: they were not particularly different from the elections in the previous years because the electoral process in Russia has not been even minimally competitive for quite some time now. Both in 2022 and 2023, elections were regional: the inhabitants of some three dozen Russian regions elected governors and local parliaments.

The chart below demonstrates the average result of the winning candidate (almost in all cases, a Kremlin-sponsored one) in the gubernatorial elections in 2012-2023.

What this chart shows is that the share of the vote received by the Kremlin-supported candidates in 2022-2023 did not differ significantly from the previous years. Instead of a sharp uptick in the war years, we see a gradual increase throughout the whole period when governors were directly elected in Russia. That is, elections were gradually hollowed out for over ten years, not wholly upended in the last two. 2018 was the last year when the Kremlin had some problems pushing through its candidates in several regions at once, mostly due to the negative fallout from increasing the retirement age; since then, gubernatorial elections have become ever more meaningless.

This year, only one region presented a problem for the Kremlin: the relatively small republic of Khakassia with some 530,000 inhabitants. Back in 2018, Valentin Konovalov, a young Communist politician, managed to get elected there, defeating the Kremlin-sponsored incumbent governor. Since then, Konovalov has secured the support of local elites and won again in 2023 despite the Kremlin pushing for an alternative candidate: Sergei Sokol, a Duma deputy who had previously volunteered to join Russia’s invading force in Ukraine. Political operatives from Moscow who managed Sokol’s campaign hoped that his status as a war veteran would help him get elected, but the opposite seemingly took place: inhabitants of Khakassia, a small region with a significant number of war casualties, rejected the war-centered campaign of Sokol in favor of Konovalov (read more about the debates between Sokol and Konovalov in this REM article).

A few local parliamentary elections also maintained a shred of competitiveness. Yabloko party, running on an openly anti-war platform, managed to elect several candidates in four regional parliaments, slightly expanding its local presence (Yabloko’s version of a peace demand involves a call to negotiate a settlement at the current separation line, not withdraw troops from the occupied territories of Ukraine). These are significant achievements for local Yabloko activists, but the party’s overall influence in Russia remains minuscule.

In sum, this year’s regional elections did not constitute a sharp break from the pre-war period. One notable difference from the previous years is the overall reduction in the number of candidates at all levels. With the heightened repression in the country, few people wanted to try their luck and contest the Kremlin-supported politicians, even without posing any radical demands. In many cases, the candidates not belonging to United Russia avoided any campaigning, trying not to draw attention to themselves (which is, of course, quite ironic in the context of elections, but not so strange for an electoral authoritarian regime).

An important development was the holding of elections in the newly occupied Ukrainian territories. As expected, this turned into a cynical and brutal affair, with electoral ‘officials’ accompanied by armed soldiers paying visits to houses and apartments in areas that had seen much Russia-inflicted bloodshed recently. The authorities proudly reported the country’s highest turnout rate in the so-called ‘new Russian regions’. The outlandish nature of this claim is revealed by the fact that the exact number of voters and even the territory on which the voting took place were never explicitly announced – how exactly the turnout rate was calculated remains a mystery.

Prospects for the Future: Presidential Election 2024

The 2023 elections have a special significance as the Kremlin plans to hold a presidential vote next year, which allows us to have a glimpse of the future. Based on past experience and current political realities, there is no doubt that Putin’s triumphant ‘re-election’ with 80% or even 90% of the vote will be declared in March 2024 without any significant problems for the regime.

One point of comparison is Syria’s presidential vote in 2014, held amongst the raging civil war. Back then, for the first time in its history, the Syrian regime conducted elections with multiple candidates, and yet, Bashar Assad won with 92,2% of the vote. According to the official statistics, over 11 million Syrians took part in the election, which, coincidentally, was more than the entire adult population of the government-controlled areas at the time. The farcical vote hardly convinced anyone, but the Russian authorities represented by the foreign ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich duly noted that turnout, transparency and the findings of foreign monitors ‘give us no reason to question the legitimacy of the election’. Undoubtedly, the Syrian authorities will return the favor in 2024 by declaring Putin’s re-election entirely free and fair.

However, the history of democratic transitions shows that a ‘triumphant’ electoral result in no way guarantees the survival of an electoral authoritarian regime. For example, in 2009, Tunisia’s dictator Ben Ali won an election with 89,6% of the vote, entering his fifth term. A little more than a year later, he was ousted by a popular movement after 23 years in power.

The contours of the future democratic transition in Russia are still indiscernible. The apparatus of repression seems firmly in control. Both elites and ordinary people, with a few exceptions, are docile and subservient to the Kremlin. The war allows Putin to rule the country under de facto, if not de jure, martial law, and the dramatic overhaul of the education system might eventually create a whole generation of thoroughly ideologized youth. At least for the time being, the Russian military is able to hold the line and avoid the collapse of the front in Ukraine.

And yet, all these signs of stability might one day prove illusionary. Many dictators seemed fully in control (and ‘won’ elections by grotesque margins) until they were not. And no dictatorship in history was able to survive indefinitely. While freedom in Russia is still out of sight, history does not teach us fatalism.

By Ilya Matveev, Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley