48% of Russians surveyed would vote for Putin if elections were next Sunday
Forty-eight percent of those Russians surveyed would vote for Vladimir Putin if presidential elections were held next Sunday, reported newspaper Kommersant, citing data from the Levada Center. Election turnout would also be high.
Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov and Liberal Democratic Party leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky would receive 3 percent of the vote (with a statistical error of 3.4 percent). Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Alexei Navalny would each receive votes of 1 percent.
Nineteen percent of survey participants said that they have not yet decided who they would vote for. Another 10 percent did not know whether they would vote and 13 percent said that they would not participate in the voting. Therefore, 42 percent of surveyed Russians are undecided as to whether they would participate in the elections and whom they would vote for.
In a similar Levada Center survey from April 2015, only 25 percent of Russian voters were undecided, while Putin’s candidacy was supported by 62 percent of those surveyed.
According to the current legislation, Russia’s next presidential election is set to take place on March 11, 2018. The State Duma is currently reviewing a bill that would postpone the upcoming presidential elections to March 18, 2018 – the day of the annexation of Crimea. The bill was approved in its first reading by the State Duma on April 12.
Russia’s current president Vladimir Putin has not yet officially announced whether he would be running for another term.
In Russia’s previous presidential elections in March 2012, Putin won 63.6 percent of the vote with a turnout of more than 65 percent. Based on the results of a poll conducted in February 2012, Levada Center predicted Putin’s victory with 66 percent of the vote.
Russia’s Central Election Commission and its upper house of parliament the Federation Council have prepared amendments to electoral legislation for the 2018 presidential elections, including the abolition of absentee voting. According to the CEC, such a measure will lead to a sharp increase in turnout.