Page 10 - Russia OUTLOOK 2024

1.0 Politics
Presidential elections
Russia will hold a presidential election on March 17, 2024 and the winner will be inaugurated in May.
The first presidential election in Russia's modern history was held on June 12, 1991. The Central Election Commission (CEC, or known by its Russian abbreviation, Tsentrizbirkom) registered six presidential candidates. All of them ran in tandem with vice presidential candidates.
Boris Yeltsin was elected the first president of the RSFSR with 57.30% (45,552,041) of the vote. Nikolay Ryzhkov came in second with 16.85% (13,359,335) and Vladimir Zhirinovsky came in third (7.81%; 6,211,007). A total of 1.92% of the voters (1,525,410) voted for the ballot option "Against all candidates", while 2.16% of ballots (1,716,757) were invalidated. On July 10, 1991 Boris Yeltsin was inaugurated as president.
The second presidential elections in 1996 were probably the fairest and most democratic in Russia’s history.
In the first round on June 16, 1996 108,495,023 voters were registered, 69.81% of whom actually voted. Boris Yeltsin received the largest number of votes with 35.28% (26,665,495), followed by Gennady Zyuganov (32.03%; 24,211,686) and Alexander Lebed (14.52%; 10,974,736).
As no one won more than 50% of the vote there was a second round, in which Yeltsin and Zyuganov faced off.
On July 3, 1996 the second round vote took place. A total of 108,589,050 people were added to the voter lists, with a turnout of 68.88%. Boris Yeltsin, the incumbent head of state, was re-elected to his second term as president of Russia, receiving 53.82% (40,202,349) of the votes. Gennady Zyuganov received 40.31% (30,104,589). As many as 4.82% of voters (3,603,760) voted for the "Against all candidates" option, and 780,592 (1.05%) ballots were invalidated.
To stand as president the law requires a candidate to gather 100,000 signatures from the people to qualify.
In 2024, voting will also take place in the Crimea and the four regions annexed by Russia in September 2023 – what Russia calls its new territories. Ukraine says it will not rest until it has ejected every last soldier from the annexed territories and refuses to recognise Russian passports issued to citizens from these regions.
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