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September’s likely winners Meet the doctors, cosmonauts, and pro-Kremlin youth stars expected to grab seats in Russia’s next Parliament

Source: Meduza

In roughly a month, on September 17, three-day parliamentary elections will begin in Russia. Using party lists, opinion polls, and turnout estimates in each region across the country, it’s relatively easy to predict the results. As ever, the biggest changes are taking place inside United Russia, the nation’s ruling political party. What’s the logic behind such changes, and whom should we expect to see in the new legislature? Political scientist Alexander Kynev explains.

The text first appeared in Russian on August 6, 2021.

What we know for sure about the new Duma

Russia’s voting system underwent a complete overhaul five years ago, just before the last State Duma elections, going from complete proportional representation (with all members elected from party lists) to a hybrid system where 225 seats are based on party lists and the remaining 225 go to single-seat constituencies.  

As in 2016, this year’s ballots will probably list 14 parties. Of these, the parties that pass the five-percent electoral threshold will win mandates. Four parties are likely to break the threshold: United Russia, the Communist Party (KPRF), the Liberal Democrats (LDPR), and A Just Russia (which has recently merged with two smaller parties: For Truth and Patriots of Russia). 

Once the votes are cast, mandates are first allocated to candidates from the federal part of the party lists. LDPR currently has the greatest number of candidates in the federal part of its list: 15 out of a possible 15. The Communists have 14, following the removal of Pavel Grudinin. United Russia has five, A Just Russia – four, the New People party – two, and Yabloko has just one candidate. 

In addition to a federal list, each party submits regional lists. Once a party has passed the five-percent threshold, seats are allocated among those lists on the basis of the actual number of votes (as opposed to percentages) that the party received in each region. In other words, the more people vote for a particular party in a region, the more representatives that region will have in the Duma.  

We can predict who will take which seats by looking at previous election results together with the likely turnout in each region and the likely spread of votes for each party. Now that the party lists are out, we can name a substantial number of candidates who are definitely getting a mandate. There is just a small zone of uncertainty on each party list where candidates’ fate remains a mystery. 

Single-seat constituencies are taken by candidates who gain the highest number of votes in their region, regardless of how many more votes they got compared with the next best candidate — it can be a matter of one vote. In 2016, United Russia took 203 out of 225 single-seat constituencies. United Russia will undoubtedly dominate here again in 2021, probably winning between 180 and 200 “single mandates.” 

A significant proportion of the current Duma members are, of course, set to stay in place, particularly those who are active legislators. These lawmakers include, for example, Deputy Speaker Alexander Zhukov, head of the budget committee Andrey Makarov (who has held the post for many years), and chairman of the committee for state-building and lawmaking Pavel Krasheninnikov. These individuals can rely on either a secure party-list spot or a safe constituency.  

That said, variety is the spice of life, and while the very core of power is stable, its actions and character do change from time to time. It is those changes that influence our attitude towards power, as well as its future trajectory. 

It is worth noting that United Russia is the only party to undergo changes of any real substance; others win so few votes that their key deputies tend to hold on to their seats. 

Out with the old 

Before we can gauge the direction of change, we need to look at the Duma’s previous incarnations. Starting in 2016, following electoral reforms, parties had to rely a lot more on support at a local level, and candidates needed to be able to win over local voters. 

For official registration, single-member constituency candidates depend on their local electoral commission, which the Putin administration effectively controls. In 2007 and 2011, candidates worked to persuade parties to add them to their lists (sometimes even resorting to cash incentives). In 2016, however, the tables turned and parties themselves were forced to seek out electable candidates in specific districts.   

As a result, the Duma’s composition became much more influenced by regional power brokers (with local lobbying power), regional elites as a whole, and voters themselves. As the number of seats electable via party lists decreased, competition between candidates became fierce. And the price of an “entry ticket” skyrocketed. 

The Duma elected in 2016 thus comprised three times fewer “random characters” that the party of power would have previously put forward for tokenistic or symbolic reasons. Take the “pensioners” and “wage workers” elected in previous years, having been put forward by the All-Russia People’s Front to demonstrate “social diversity.” No one had ever heard of these candidates before, and they did not actually represent any organized social group whatsoever. The new rules introduced in 2016 left little scope for such experiments, as competition became cut-throat.

But some of the changes in group numbers were too radical to be attributed to electoral reforms alone. For example, there was an enormous rise in the number of former municipal government officials, a noticeable fall in business owners, a doubling of candidates from the media and sports, and an ever-increasing share of state-employed candidates. New political spin and legal forces caused these changes.

The long and short of it is that the 2016 elections relied on low turnout (the date was deliberately moved to the third Sunday of September). The authorities selected candidates from the walks of life that usually appeal to voters even without much “special effort” (without vote tampering and so on). That pool included candidates working in education and health, municipal politicians, and celebrities. 

In with the new 

Unlike in 2016, when party lists hinged on a certain common philosophy (to secure candidates bound to be voted in on a low turnout), no single electoral strategy seems to govern lists in 2021. Rather, they appear to be some public officials’ attempts to score points with others and gratify their whimsical tastes. 

On the one hand, the lists are still full of candidates left over from 2016, which can be interpreted as fears of changing and pushing the system in a certain direction, and the realization that “well, someone has to do the work.” On the other hand, some of the notable categories of candidates from 2016 that represented real interest groups have eroded.

The most affected group is the “municipal faction”: many of the former mayors who had become deputies have either not made it onto party lists this year or now find themselves in clearly unwinnable districts. United Russia has reduced this resource to virtually nothing: In 2016, many of Russia’s remaining elected mayors became deputies, and their appointed (not elected) successors lack their predecessors’ clout, so turnover is high. You’d be hard-pressed to find a mayor these days who has been in office for more than two years, and mayors no longer bring many votes to their parties, as a result. 

Cosmonauts are slowly on their way out, too, but the same cannot be said for TV news anchors, who are still keen to run for office. This year, Timofei Bazhenov from the channel NTV and Evgeny Popov from Rossiya-1 are standing for election in Moscow. The cohort of media personalities also includes former U.S. convict (now Civic Chamber member) Maria Butina. 

The Duma will also keep its professional athletes (hockey players Vyacheslav Fetisov and Vladislav Tretiak, figure skater Irina Rodnina, and biathletes Anton Shipulin and Sergey Chepikov), who will be joined by two newcomers: the skiers Elena Vyalbe and Lyubov Yegorova. 

Among public sector candidates, there has been a sharp increase in doctors from a range of disciplines. Given the ongoing pandemic, bureaucrats must think that Russians will automatically vote for doctors (though it should be noted that many of the nominated healthcare professionals have nothing to do with fighting COVID-19).

Unlike the medical contingent, promising new candidates with a background in education are few and far between.

In the five years since the last State Duma elections, Russia has replaced 75 governors in 63 regions, with new blood taking over from previous regional leaders’ hand-picked successors. 

A number of heavyweight federal officials, both former and current, are bound to end up getting seats. To name a few: former Employment and Social Care Minister Maxim Topilin; former Natural Resources Minister and ex-Governor of Yamal Dmitry Kobylkin; Deputy Employment and Social Care Minister and ex-Duma member Olga Batalina; ex-Deputy Prime Minister, former Agriculture Minister, and current State Duma Deputy Speaker Alexey Gordeev; and Tatyana Dyakonova, the human resources director at Russia’s Economic Development Ministry. 

Inevitably, some candidates have enviable family connections. Good fortune will likely shine on Vasily Filipenko, the son of former Khanty-Mansiysk Autonomous Region Governor Alexander Filipenko. The same goes for Olga Anufrieva, a senior partner at the “Andrey Makarov and Alexander Tobak” law firm, founded by Duma budget committee head Andrey Makarov. 

Another expected winner is Magadan City Duma deputy Anton Basansky, the son of local business magnate Alexander Basansky. Meanwhile, in the Irkutsk region, the latest joke is that family members are vying for three of the region’s four available Duma seats: Sergey Ten (whose father served in the federal legislature), Alexander Yakubovsky (the son of former Irkutsk Mayor Vladimir), and Anton Krasnoshtanov (whose father is a property developer and also serves in the State Duma). Anton is currently Irkutsk’s first deputy mayor, but he is positioned to replace his dad in Moscow, after September’s elections. 

Duma debutantes 

Newcomers will include candidates who took part in the various state-run competitions aimed at “creating a new elite”, as well as representatives of social and quasi-public structures that are trying to join in with the hottest government-favored trends. These include various voluntary organizations, movements for the protection of family values or historic monuments, etc.

Competitions from recent years, somewhat reminiscent in the format of the late Komsomol “games”, are taken so seriously by the Kremlin that in almost every region their participants ended up in United Russia primaries. Some of them have made it onto the party lists and now stand a chance of getting into the Duma. 

Whilst some of these candidates enjoy some level of renown, most are just driven and career-oriented young people. A bit like the young communists of the Komsomol movement in the dusk days of the Soviet Union who, under the protection of regional and city committee bosses, opened adult video stores and traded jeans under the guise of youth initiatives. A political Pandora’s box whose graduates might end up just about anywhere, depending on the market environment. 

One of this year’s stand-out candidates who has received significant praise is Krasnoyarsk city council deputy Natalya Kaptelinina. In 2007, she was involved in a serious road accident that left her almost entirely paralyzed, and she has since made it her job to defend people with musculoskeletal disorders. It is not entirely clear what this has to do with her political prospects or why the place she has on the party list is so much higher than many other better-known candidates. As noted in her profile on the primaries website, “in 2020, [she] was selected to be one of 100 finalists of the ‘Leaders of Russia: Politics’ contest, and [she] won the ‘Federal Polit Startup’ in 2021, representing United Russia.”

As volunteerism is so popular with the party in power, some seats will be taken by functionaries with a background in volunteering. For example, karate champion Anton Solovyev will win in St. Petersburg. He heads the Health, Physical Culture, and Sports Center in the city’s Frunzensk district, and his candidate profile notes that he “initiated the work of an All-Russia People’s Front volunteering center in 2020, in response to the coronavirus pandemic.” (Whatever “initiated” means.)  

Vladimir Samokish, the chairman of the State Duma’s Budget, Economics, and Property Committee, will likely hold onto his seat. Samokish won the “Leaders of Russia” contest in 2018 and helped organize the #THANKYOUDOCTORS project in Tomsk.

Mikhail Vdovin, the first deputy chairman in Oryol’s regional legislature and the head of United Russia’s local faction, is also in a strong position. On March 24, 2020, he was appointed head of the party’s volunteer center to assist citizens with pandemic-related issues. 

It is participants in these competitions for ambitious young people and members of pro-government public bodies that may well determine the face of the new parliament.

Still unknown, however, is to whom these candidates can turn (other than their “mentors” and “facilitators”) and whether voters will like them at all. Perhaps that is why United Russia’s list has been bulked out with 48 governors. This year’s election results now rest entirely on their shoulders. 

Will any ‘New People’ make it? 

The proportion of contest winners in the Duma will be even higher if the “New People” party gets through. This group turned to similar competition winners when nominating its candidates. In theory, the New People have a shot at becoming the fifth party to enter the Duma, particularly judging by the regional election results in September 2020 when the group won seats in every region in which it competed. There are three factors in its favor:

What holds the New People back is the group’s lack of prominent, popular candidates on its party list (the only well-known candidate, other than party leader Alexey Nechaev, is the former mayor of Yakutsk, Sardana Avksentyeva) and a weak set of candidates in single-seat constituencies (when these candidates are strong, they always help boost votes for the party list, too). 

It is difficult to predict how these strengths and weaknesses will play out, but results will likely range between 3 percent (which will secure state financing and benefits when registering for future elections) and 5 percent or more. 

Even if the New People make it to Parliament, however, the party’s presence will be mere window dressing for the new Duma, changing little in the legislature’s overall alignment.