Flowers instead of election advertising
There is an election campaign going on in Russia and hardly anyone is aware of it. What is it actually about?
A woman walks past an election poster in Russian-occupied Doetsk
© Dmitry Yagodkin / TASS / Imago Images
The war in Ukraine is on and at the same time Russia is organizing its regional elections. Election observers speak of the most meaningless, boring and inconspicuous election campaign in recent history. Who will benefit is already known before the official results.
Mayoral elections are taking place in Moscow this Sunday – but who? Election campaign searches, searches in vain. There are hardly any posters in the center of the Russian capital, let alone party stands. In some hallways there are at least notes with a call for online voting. Instead, there are flowers from incumbent Sergei Sobyanin, who is counting on his re-election – and according to forecasts, should easily achieve this goal. Huge flowerbeds have been set up in front of Red Square. In many streets, passers-by now walk under arches planted with flowers. In late summer weather, the street cafes are full. There is no sign of Russia’s war against Ukraine.
Sobyanin is known for having the metropolis beautified, especially before elections. For the fact that there is hardly any freedom of demonstration and freedom of expression, but instead seas of flowers, new walking paths and chic children’s playgrounds in the city’s wealthier districts. The 65-year-old enjoys popularity with many residents. On the other hand, his actions caused ridicule and annoyance among critical Muscovites. The man from the Kremlin party United Russia likes to appear alongside President Vladimir Putin in public.
But elections are not only due in Moscow on Sunday. Across Russia, the governors will be re-elected in a total of 22 regions and the regional parliaments in 16 regions. More than a year and a half after the start of the war of aggression against Ukraine, the Russian occupying power has also scheduled referendums in the annexed areas of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhia and Cherson. The elections there began at the end of August, but their results are not internationally recognized – just as little as was the case with the sham referendums on the illegal incorporation of the four territories last year.
Kremlin party United Russia is courted
But even on Russian soil, according to observers, people are further away from fair and free elections than they have been since the beginning of Putin’s rule around 24 years ago. “This is the most meaningless, boring and inconspicuous election campaign in recent Russian history,” write the election observers of the independent organization Golos (English: voice) in a report. Its co-chairman Grigory Melkonyants was recently arrested in Moscow. The organization, which has repeatedly disclosed massive violations of voting rights and fraud in recent years, is a thorn in the side of the power apparatus and has been branded a “foreign agent” for years.
This time, too, Golos has already uncovered cases of pressure and manipulation before things have even really started. In state institutions, for example, supervisors are now openly and unabashedly asking their employees to vote for United Russia candidates, the Golos experts write in their report. The Kremlin party, with its 34,000 candidates nationwide, is also shown and praised more in the state media than any other party.
Opposition fights oppression and insignificance
Since the beginning of the war against Ukraine, the repression of critics of the Kremlin in the largest country in the world in terms of area has increased massively. The number of applicants for political office has fallen drastically. The prison camp for Russia’s best-known opposition politician, Alexei Navalny, who received more than 27 percent of the vote in the 2013 mayoral election in Moscow, was increased to 19 years at the beginning of August. Politicians like Vladimir Kara-Murza, Ilya Yashin, Andrei Pivovarov are also deprived of their freedom for many years – the list goes on and on.
The only real opposition party that is still running candidates is Yabloko. But the liberal party with the apple logo, which hasn’t sat in the Duma since 2007, is now fighting above all against political insignificance – and against state harassment. A Yabloko candidate was arrested in St. Petersburg while distributing campaign brochures. The police came to search the house of a party colleague, and investigations are underway into another because of a white-blue-white flag – a symbol of Russian opponents of the war.
Symbol choice for the Kremlin
Independent Russian experts say the September elections are particularly important for the power apparatus in Moscow. After all, this is the last major wave of voting before Putin, in all likelihood, wants to be elected to his fifth term next spring.
“The demonstration of control is the main theme of these elections,” says exiled political scientist Kirill Rogov in a media briefing organized by the German Sakharov Society. His colleague Alexander Kynev, who stayed in Moscow, also speaks of “symbolically very important” votes for the Kremlin – also with a view to the fact that many of the regions in which elections are now held were traditionally more of a protest region.
The renowned sociologist Lev Gudkov, on the other hand, considers it a calculation that there is hardly any visible election campaigning in these wartime elections. In an interview with the German Press Agency, the head of the independent opinion research institute Lewada says that dissatisfied citizens who are opposed to the opposition should not even think that they can make a difference with their vote.
When asked to what extent the elections can still be considered a meaningful test of public opinion given the massive repression, Gudkow has an extremely brief answer ready: “Not at all.” Then he has to smile briefly and adds: “It’s like a kind of beauty contest by the local bureaucracy.”