Page 11 - RusRPTApr24

Republic in 1991, but there is still some way to go to match the Stalin era of 100% turnout in votes to appoint new deputies.
Since Putin was re-elected in 2018, voting in Russia has become even less transparent, and offered greater opportunities for fraud. Remote electronic voting was conducted in 29 Russian regions. Some 70% of the 4.7mn voters registered to vote online apparently cast their votes on the first of the three-day poll. Monitoring violations at physical polling stations is an almost impossible task. The Central Electoral Commission stopped broadcasting live footage from monitoring cameras in polling stations after the pictures from 2018 had depicted numerous violations and led observers to conclude that the scale of ballot stuffing was so great that the real result could not be determined in at least 11 regions.
The 2024 poll also differed from Putin’s two most recent victories in the selection of candidates who ran against the Kremlin leader. In 2012, political strategists allowed businessman Mikhail Prokhorov to stand, proposing that Russia’s marginal liberal opposition would consolidate around him. And in 2018, that same role went to TV presenter Ksenia Sobchak. But this time round there was no acceptable liberal candidate. Even the little-known politician Boris Nadezhdin, who timidly spoke out against the war in Ukraine, was denied registration. On the ballot were only Putin’s “rivals” from the systemic opposition parties. All of them have been equally supportive of Russia’s repressive turn, backing various crackdown measures that have come before the State Duma in recent years.
The extras in the 2024 race — Communist Nikolai Kharitonov, Vladislav Davankov of New People, and Leonid Slutsky of the LDPR — polled less than 12% combined. That’s slightly less than communist candidate Pavel Grudinin managed on his own in 2018. The 75-year-old Kharitonov’s 4.3% was better than the youthful Davankov’s 3.8%, while Slutsky, the unsuccessful heir to charismatic populist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, trailed in last with 3.2%.
2.2 Putin 5.0
Vladimir Putin secured a record victory in Russia’s presidential election over the weekend. The focus now will be on whether this emboldens Putin to devote more resources to the war effort, whether policymakers push through unpopular non-war fiscal tightening to maintain macroeconomic stability and whether there are any changes in the political landscape, including the positions of power close to Putin.
Putin is on course to secure more than 87% of the vote, a record-breaking victory and higher than his vote share in the 2018 election of 77%. Putin received more than 94% of the vote in the Luhansk and Donetsk regions of annexed Ukraine. The three challengers – Vladislav Davankov of the New People’s Party, Leonid Slutsky of the Liberal Democratic Party, and Nikolai Kharitonov of the Communist Party – received 3-4%.
11 RUSSIA Country Report April 2024 www.intellinews.com