MADRID: The result of Sunday’s presidential election in Russia is a foregone conclusion — and the only thing to be decided is by how large will Vladimir Putin’s majority be when he is returned to power for a fourth and second-consecutive term.
But with many Russians complacent over the outcome and the inevitability of Putin’s victory, just how many will bother to turn out to cast ballots.
Officially, there are eight candidates — and to avoid a run-off, the winning candidate needs at least 50 per cent of the votes cast. A raft of opinion polls all consistently place Putin in and around the 70 per cent level of support. Worryingly, however, voter turnout on Sunday could be so low as to raise concerns about the legitimacy of his win and affect his long-term ambitions. His campaign has been lacklustre, he hasn’t taken part in televised candidates’ debates, and he hasn’t offered much in the way of new policies.
But then again, with 70 per cent support, there seems little reason for Putin to have to campaign or offer new ideas. Russians are happy with him — and their lot.
It also helps Putin’s cause too that his main political rival, Alexei Navalny, has been banned from contesting Sunday’s vote following a fraud conviction that his supporters say was politically motivated.
Those opinion polls that put Putin’s support at the 70 per cent mark do not include questions of expected voter turnout. One that did, from the Levada Centre last November, said that only 24 per cent of Russians said they would cast ballots, and another 34 per cent said they were likely to do so. Since then, the agency has been denounced as acting for foreign governments, peddling fake news, and has been banned. Dissent, or even suggest apathy, is frowned upon in Putin’s Russia.
With Navalny out of the race, the other candidate likely to garner most votes is a former Communist who turned a collective farm near Moscow into Russia’s biggest strawberry farm. Pavel Grudinin will likely only get around 8 per cent in Sunday’s vote, but that hasn’t stopped him from holding up his strawberry empire as a model to Russians on how workers should be treated.
“When people ask me why I’m running, I want everyone is Russia to live like this,” he said. “And that’s possible.” His workers enjoy better-than-average wages, health and pensions, and he provided child care for employees’ children.
Grudinin has been critical of the Kremlin and Putin. In the run-up to Sunday’s vote, he’s had to fend off allegations that he hold millions in foreign accounts, funded by the collective strawberry farm.
Perhaps the candidate with the most colour and recognisability is reality star Ksenia Sobchak. She’s a former journalist but s more famous for her modelling career in the Russian version of New Runway Model.
Despite her good lucks, she is a vocal critic of Putin and wants the Crimea, annexed by Russia in March 2014, returned to Ukraine. She has little support, standing at less than 2 per cent in opinion polls — which speaks to the popularity too of her advocating closer ties to the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation.
In an interview recently on CNN, Sobchak was stingingly critical of the current Russian political system. “In Russia, unfortunately, we have a joke that you cannot choose your parents, nor where you were born, nor your president,” she said.
She is the daughter of the former mayor of St. Petersburg — the man who set Putin on his rise to power. She’s dismissed as being the “Paris Hilton of Russia” — but the reality is that her connections by birthright to the political elite allow her outbursts to go unanswered if not unnoticed.
Either way, for now, Putin is not in campaign mode — nor does he have to be. Another five years at the helm in the Kremlin are assured.
