Leonid Slutsky was promised second place in the September elections, sources tell Meduza. Frustrated that the Kremlin stopped helping, he’s now saying LDPR belongs to the security services instead.

Leonid Slutsky, who leads Russia’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDPR), has begun casting it as a “party of security officials” rather than as a party of the Kremlin’s civilian staff. That is how Slutsky describes the party in private conversations with allies and with businesspeople close to the Liberal Democrats, and even in public campaign materials.

A post on LDPR’s Facebook page says security officials are running for the party in elections to the State Duma, Russia’s lower house of parliament. Slutsky made the same point on his VKontakte page. The party’s social media posts read (errors as in the original):

Two LDPR members and a strategist who works with the political bloc of Russia’s Presidential Administration told Meduza about the shift in positioning.

The party changed its image because Slutsky is unhappy with the work of the political bloc headed by Sergei Kiriyenko. The reason for his displeasure is the party’s declining ratings and the fear that comes with them — that LDPR will fail to take the coveted second place, or even third.

“[At the political bloc] they promised second place, but they’re not delivering. It didn’t work out in the presidential election, and they’re not helping in the Duma election,” said one party member, summing up Slutsky’s complaints.

The same member said Slutsky now coordinates the campaign not with Alexander Kharichev, head of the Social Monitoring Directorate, but with Andrey Yarin, head of the Domestic Policy Directorate.

Under the Kremlin’s informal division of labor, Kharichev — who is close to the head of the political bloc — oversees election campaigns; Yarin handles day-to-day “operational” matters with regional authorities. Yarin has always been seen as closer to the security officials than to Kiriyenko’s team.

After the full-scale invasion began and Vladimir Zhirinovsky, LDPR’s founder, died in 2022, the Presidential Administration’s political bloc did try to pull LDPR into second place in regional elections. It managed to secure that result only last year, when LDPR finished second in seven of the 11 regions electing legislatures.

In the 2024 presidential election, LDPR’s new leader finished only fourth, behind not just Russian President Vladimir Putin but also Communist Party (KPRF) nominee Nikolai Kharitonov and Vladislav Davankov of the New People party. That happened even though the political bloc had sent Andrey Polosin, an experienced political strategist close to Kiriyenko, to help Slutsky, and even though the leaders of KPRF and New People took no part in the campaign.

According to the strategist working with the political bloc, “that’s when the mutual grievances between Slutsky and Kiriyenko’s team began.”

“Andrey [Polosin] did good work, but Slutsky and [Maria Voropayeva, the head of the party’s staff] complained about him to Kharichev constantly. They tried complaining to Kiriyenko, too. At some point SVK stopped talking to him and handed Slutsky off to Kharichev — that stung as well,” the strategist said. “Though at a congress or a public event Kiriyenko will, of course, say hello and toss out a line.”

The political bloc’s complaint, which Meduza has reported before, is that Slutsky cannot pull off the role of a public politician and that he himself “doesn’t understand this,” according to the strategist who works with the Presidential Administration and another source close to the Kremlin. Even so, Slutsky is seriously trying to become the party’s frontman: he has led and continues to lead LDPR’s lists in regional legislative elections.

“In the Russian system, it’s not a problem for a loyal party to be run by an uncharismatic man — no,” said a political strategist who works with the Kremlin. “You can be smarter about it: push other, more public figures to the front. Or just work with slogans and branding and try to take second place that way, especially when your interests line up with the Presidential Administration’s. But that doesn’t suit Slutsky’s vanity.”

The party is repeating that mistake in the current campaign, he said: its leader takes part in debate after debate and puts himself front and center in LDPR’s campaign videos, in which he urges voters to “save Russia” by voting for the party.

Another prominent LDPR figure appears in one of those videos: Viktor Bout, an arms dealer convicted in the United States, whom Russia exchanged in 2022 for basketball player Brittney Griner, who had been detained at Sheremetyevo Airport with hashish oil for a vape pen. Bout is on the federal portion of the party’s State Duma list, but in this ad he, for some reason, plays an ordinary businessman.

A source in the party said the campaign built around Slutsky is aimed mainly at a loyalist, patriotic electorate, and he sees no problem with that. He acknowledged, though, that internal polling shows Slutsky’s name recognition is low even among LDPR sympathizers.

After Zhirinovsky’s death, LDPR continued to use his image in some regional elections, and it remained the centerpiece of Slutsky’s 2024 presidential campaign messaging. In the current State Duma campaign, though, the founder’s name is almost absent.

Under Zhirinovsky, LDPR eagerly played up the issue of “fighting migrants.” By the early 2010s, however, the party had scaled back its use of the “Russian question” in its messaging at the Kremlin’s prompting. Under Slutsky, LDPR returned to anti-migrant appeals, riding a wave of xenophobic sentiment that grew among Russians in the 2020s.

Now the party’s leadership is unhappy with the political bloc’s unspoken ban on flirting with nationalist ideas. Still, posts with xenophobic appeals continue to go up on LDPR’s social media accounts.

“It [the nationalist theme] would give us a good boost, but Slutsky apparently didn’t get the go-ahead. Maybe he couldn’t have. And yet he presented himself as someone the Presidential Administration supports and helps in every way!” said a party member critical of the LDPR leader.

Both he and the strategist working with the Presidential Administration believe that recasting the Liberal Democrats as a party of security officials, and Slutsky’s outreach to Yarin, who is close to the security officials, are meant to paper over, within the party, the evident lack of understanding between Slutsky’s team and the political bloc’s leadership.

“Slutsky came into the party leadership as the political bloc’s man. If something is wrong in his relationship with Kiriyenko, [Slutsky, for appearances,] needs a new patron — real or imagined — who will deliver the necessary result. The security officials and Yarin became just that. And Slutsky really does go to Yarin — on day-to-day party business. But it’s Kharichev who oversees the elections,” said the strategist who works with the Presidential Administration’s political bloc.

Meduza’s sources do not rule out that LDPR could finish not second but as low as fourth in the State Duma elections. Second place, by their account, will go to KPRF, and New People may contend for third.

The party A Just Russia, in their view, will make it into the State Duma only if the political bloc receives instructions to that effect from Putin. “In the polling, public and internal alike, they don’t clear the threshold. The story with [A Just Russia leader Sergei] Mironov will only push their ratings down. But there’s no clarity yet on whether they’ll be in parliament. If the president wants to keep the current lineup of Duma factions, A Just Russia will get help,” said the strategist working with the Presidential Administration.

In his view, the Kremlin will not put in the effort to pull LDPR up to second or third place: “If they get to third on their own — which is realistic — no problem. If they don’t, that’s their problem. They’ve been helped every way possible for years as it is.”

LDPR had not responded to Meduza’s request for comment at the time of publication.