Russia’s first parliamentary election since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine begins tomorrow, with its only anti-war party barred and genuine competition all but eliminated

Voting for a new Russian parliament begins tomorrow. The State Duma elections will run for three days, from September 18 to 20. This will be the first Duma election since Russia launched its full-scale war against Ukraine. But the candidates are largely the same: More than 70% of current lawmakers are seeking another term. Voters will elect 450 State Duma members: 225 through party-list voting and 225 from single-member districts, where they choose a specific candidate. As Meduza reported several months ago, the authorities intend to ensure there is no genuine competition in these elections.

Pro-government pollsters claim United Russia’s support is higher than it was in 2021. A week before voting begins, FOM and VTsIOM put the party’s support at 33–37%, compared with 29% before the last election, and predicted that it would win 47–53% of the vote. In 2021, pollsters predicted 41–42% for United Russia, but its official result was 50%. If United Russia improves on that result now — amid the war, escalating repression, and economic problems — it will show that the authorities have “complete control over the vote” in Russia, according to Faridaily.

Further reading

Meduza’s sources close to the Kremlin say Putin’s team registered an antiwar party as an experiment and shut it down, banning Yabloko from the ballot, when the polling came back

a month ago

Yabloko, the only anti-war party, was barred from the elections. The Central Election Commission initially registered Yabloko’s party list, but two weeks later — amid a surge of interest in the party — the Supreme Court disqualified it on absurd grounds. Courts also began removing Yabloko candidates running in single-member districts from the ballot. In some regions, however, other strong challengers to United Russia candidates were also disqualified. There is some good news: The pressure on Yabloko has shown that the party has support among young people.

With no better option, voters have begun taking a closer look at New People. The party is a Kremlin project designed to appeal to liberal voters. It has cultivated a reputation for opposing government bans but does not cross the authorities’ red lines on crucial issues such as support for the war. As political competition has been increasingly eliminated, some young and protest-minded voters have come to see New People as an acceptable alternative to United Russia and the old parties of the Kremlin-tolerated “systemic opposition.” VTsIOM predicts that New People will compete with the Liberal Democratic Party for third place in the elections.

Further reading

Gerrymandering à la russe: To preserve United Russia’s supermajority, the Kremlin is pressuring Communists to sideline their strongest candidates in September’s elections

3 months ago

“Undesirable” candidates were disqualified en masse over posts about Navalny. The scheme works like this: Old posts mentioning Alexey Navalny or his organizations suddenly surface on a candidate’s social media accounts. The candidate is fined for displaying “extremist symbols” and barred from running in elections for another year. The first person targeted under this scheme was Boris Nadezhdin, the only anti-war candidate in the 2024 presidential election. He left Russia because of pressure that began ahead of the State Duma elections.

The election debates became a farce. Television channels are required to give candidates free airtime for debates. But Russia has long lacked a culture of political debate — Vladimir Putin has not participated in a single debate during his 26 years in power — and this was particularly evident ahead of the current elections. Candidates from United Russia and other Kremlin-tolerated parties either skipped the debates entirely or attended but remained silent. The channels sometimes cut away from the debates to show Putin or Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin.

Further reading

Bending with the wind Created to co-opt urban voters, this minority party’s wartime struggles expose how little space remains for opposition politics in Russia

a year ago

The opposition has proposed several protest-voting strategies. In today’s Russia, elections remain one of the few legal ways to express dissent. The disqualification of candidates the authorities deem unacceptable and vote rigging have narrowed the space for such protest, but it still exists. Here is how different groups within the Russian opposition recommend using it:

• Spoil the ballot. Yabloko is promoting this approach. The party is urging its supporters to spoil their ballots in the party-list vote. In single-member districts, they should vote for Yabloko candidates where any remain. Where there are none, they should spoil those ballots too.
• Vote against United Russia. This is the strategy proposed by Maxim Katz and Yulia Navalnaya. In the party-list vote, they recommend choosing any party except United Russia. In single-member districts, they suggest voting for the strongest challenger to the United Russia candidate. Yabloko has openly criticized this approach.
• Go to polling stations at noon. Ilya Yashin and Maxim Reznik argue that this will allow people to protest the war and the current government legally. Yashin is urging people to come at noon and vote against United Russia, while Reznik offers no guidance on how to vote.
• Do not vote for anyone who supports the war. This is the Russian Anti-War Committee’s only recommendation. Beyond that, the committee considers it unnecessary to prescribe a specific tactic, such as spoiling the ballot, supporting United Russia’s opponents, or going to the polls at noon.
• Stay home and do not vote for anyone. Garry Kasparov, among others, is calling for a boycott. “Calling on people to participate in these ‘elections,’ or going to vote in them yourself, means voluntarily taking part in a political spectacle,” the opposition politician said.

Should we expect street protests? It’s unclear. The most visible protest action may be “Noon for Peace,” proposed by Ilya Yashin and several other opposition figures. The action requires people to show up at polling stations and could provide a measure of the extent of public discontent in Russia. But it is too early to judge how many people will heed Yashin’s call. Meanwhile, the Russian authorities are preparing for possible protests outside polling stations abroad: they have already asked that rallies near Russian embassies in various countries be banned during the State Duma elections.