Presidential elections 2024: Does the opposition have a chance?

In this interview for REM, a political analyst talks about his expectations from the upcoming presidential elections and shares his thoughts on how and when one could expect changes in the current political regime in Russia. The first part of the interview is available here.

Part II. On chances of oppositional candidates to be registered and what should we keep track of during the campaign

The opposition believes the upcoming elections to become fateful for the country. Do you agree with this?

The fatefulness is that the highest authority in the state gets a mandate for the next six years. It is a new starting point for any country, because everything is tied to the elections. Elections are the end date of the contracts within the government itself. The president, elected for a new term, has his hands free. He can reshape everything around him in a new way. A change of term very often meant a change of government, a change of teams in our country. In 2004, Mikhail Kasyanov was removed close to the election date, and Mikhail Fradkov was appointed. In 2012, [First Deputy Chief of Staff of the Russian Presidential Administration Vladislav] Surkov left before the elections and Vyacheslav Volodin took his place. They had completely different approaches to the domestic policy. The beginning of a new term of office is a period of renegotiating contracts within the government. In this respect, it is always a period of fears, risks, worries, and redistribution. Therefore, this period is naturally important for the authorities. Moreover, they realize that they do not control everything and worry whether their plan succeeds or not. They are also afraid of voters. Nobody expected protests in 2011. They know and understand everything, but their fears do not disappear.

What are your expectations for the post-election period?

I expect some kind of temporary calm, because psychosis and paranoia are inevitable around the election time. The authorities are afraid of conspiracies. They are afraid that someone will disrupt something somewhere to spoil the “gala day”. They are afraid because their careers depend on it. Any official responsible for a department does not want his department to suffer damage. Those who worked well during the elections are always rewarded, and those who worked badly are punished. No one wants to be considered as the worst one, no one wants to put his own career at risk. On the contrary, every official wants to stand out, to be a straight-A pupil. All these fears will go away after March 2024. At the moment, everyone who works in the public sector – journalists, social activists, NGOs, experts – is in the high-risk group, because anyone can get in trouble due to the total paranoia in the elites.

Is the result important to Putin? I mean the announced 80% of votes in his favor with an 80% turnout?

And where did you hear this announcement? There were no public statements on this subject, it's a media speculation. In fact, we have never had a turnout higher than 70%. Only once it has reached 77% - in 1991, when Yeltsin was elected. After that the numbers were always lower. In 2004 the turnout amounted to 64%, in 2012 it was 65% and last time it was 67.5%. 80% can only be reached by falsifications. If we consider this aim of guaranteeing an 80% turnout as real, it is impossible to attain it by honest means, this seems obvious to me. It might be achieved with help of the remote e-voting system. During the elections in 2023 there was no turnout increase registered anywhere. Traditionally, the turnout in every region is more or less stable: if it fluctuates at all, then within the range of few percents. The remote e-voting provides opportunities for adding up to 10%. A significant turnout increase in 2023 was registered only in the regions using the remote e-voting system. An almost 10% turnout increase in Moscow goes back to the remote e-voting system.

So turnout is still important?

It’s a purely internal parameter. If you, as a manager, promised a certain sales result, you are responsible for it. Officials will try to make this promise real so that they don't get fired. So the turnout is important for the officials, yes. As for Putin, I don’t think he cares whether the turnout amounts to 60% or 80%.

Putin announced his intention to run for president without any pathos, “as a matter of routine procedure”. Why?

I think it's a part of his image. “Everything is all right. I'm successful in my job, I have a lot of plans”. The hotline in December showed that the president was aware of car prices, he was aware of how much the reservoir level had dropped in a certain region, etc. There were a lot of detailed questions that he was obviously prepared for and knew the numbers. The goal was to demonstrate that he has his finger on the pulse, everything is all right, problems are being solved, and the economy is stable. Yes, there are problems with inflation, but we will solve them. In these circumstances, the nomination should be as routine and calm as possible. There should be no signs of anything extraordinary happening. People must be assured that there is no need for changing anything. The idea to vote for an opponent is born out of the feeling that everything is bad. This feeling can come up if the authorities are nervous. Therefore, there should be no nervousness to be seen. The authorities are absolutely calm, Putin is smiling, confident and so on.

That’s why he does not need any positive program at all? What will his campaign be based on?

In this situation, yes, [he doesn’t need a positive program]. Because there are no alternative ideas uniting the opposition. [His campaign will be based] on the argument that everything is normal, that everything is fine. They used pretty much the same idea during the gubernatorial elections in 2023: now is not the time for changes, now is not the time for experiments. What we need are tried and trusted people. We live in challenging times, but the government copes with it just fine, and any experiments are dangerous.

Are other candidates and their slogans important?

Yes, they are. Votes for alternative candidates, even if they are controlled by the Kremlin, can help measure how many people are ready to vote for an alternative. I presume that new candidates from the mainstream opposition will show a better result than old candidates. Because there is a demand for renewal. Let’s take the journalist Ekaterina Duntsova from Rzhev as an example: no one has ever heard her name before, yet she already has 30 times more followers on Telegram than Yavlinsky. What does it mean? It means that there is a demand for new faces, new blood, new ideas. Because all the old, dull candidates who have already disappointed the voters several times are no longer of interest to anyone. People want something new. Why is the turnout so low at the elections? Because the majority of potential voters just do not vote; they have simply withdrawn into their own shells. They see no light, no alternative. The authorities bring their voters to the elections, and the rest just sit at home and do not vote.

But this time almost all the candidates are new, except for Communist Nikolay Kharitonov.

His self-nomination is a total suicide [for the Communists]. In my opinion, the problem is that the alternative candidates just won't be campaigning. It’s going to be more a gesture than anything. You won't see big campaign offices, trips to the regions. Most likely, they'll participate in several debates at 7:00 a.m., and that’s it. But the results they achieve even under the given circumstances are of interest. It's still a survey of some kind.

Any nominated candidate will face a very tough choice this time. By doing nothing one would achieve rather poor results, which is bad for the image. By starting a serious campaign one could perform well, which would spoil the relations with the authorities. Both options are bad. Not going to the elections at all is also not an option. Because if you don't go, they will definitely ask you: “Who are you for?”. If you nominate, this question is off the table. In this regards, nomination is a way for the mainstream opposition members to avoid the question of whether they support Putin or not. It's an attempt to save face in the eyes of their core voters. In this respect, they are all more or less in the same boat. The decision of the “Just Russia” party not to nominate a candidate (they supported Putin's nomination) is a political suicide.

And what about Yabloko?

Yabloko did everything not to participate. According to a public statement by Yavlinsky, 10 million signatures were needed. That's really a lot; Yabloko has never received that many votes in the whole history of the party. This is a task which is impossible to achieve, it’s clear from the very beginning: it provides the opportunity to jump off the train by saying: “We don’t have enough signatures anyway, so we’ll just let it be”.

Kremlin wouldn’t have approved any other candidate but Yavlinsky. A different candidate from this party could have achieved a good score in the elections. Due to the novelty effect. Yavlinsky himself is a very toxic candidate. Many people are ready to vote for Yabloko, but not for Yavlinsky. Have a look at the Pskov region. In district councils Yabloko candidates get better results than Yabloko gets in federal elections. People are ready to vote for [Pskov Yabloko leader Lev] Shlosberg and his team, but they don't want to vote for Yavlinsky and his team. I think that even a weak new candidate from the Yabloko-party could have achieved a better result than Yavlinsky did in the last presidential elections. I think that Yavlinsky wouldn't want his party to have any other candidate but himself – because it would undermine his credibility. Yavlinsky's position is that of a dog-in-the-manger: He doesn’t really want it but prevents anyone else from having it.

What do you think of Ekaterina Duntsova's campaign?

In my opinion, it was quite an interesting electoral experiment in terms of the demand for new faces. Given that Duntsova didn’t have money for her campaign at all, the response is very broad. Despite the fact that Duntsova is a person without federal resources, not from Moscow.

Duntsova's registration was a dream-like scenario from the very beginning. The authorities will definitely not go for experiments this year. They don’t need unpredictable candidates with unknown level of support. Only tried and trusted people will be allowed, there shouldn’t be any surprises.

Do Boris Nadezhdin and other liberal candidates have any chance of being registered?

Yes, they do. Boris Nadezhdin is a systemic politician. He is quite well incorporated; there were times that he was a faction deputy together with Kirienko. They definitely know each other for a long time.

In theory, there could be one or two liberal candidates. Vladislav Davankov, deputy speaker of the State Duma, has been nominated from the “New People” party, and there is Boris Nadezhdin.... It is better for the authorities to have several candidates of this kind. Like in 2018, when Ksenia Sobchak, Grigory Yavlinsky and Boris Titov were representing the liberal camp at the same time. The authorities were very happy about that, because in the end the votes of democratically-minded people were split between the three of them, whereas not a single candidate could actually benefit from it. If they want to consolidate these votes, they will let only one candidate participate in the elections. If they don’t want to consolidate the votes, they will register several candidates.

Is there any opposition left in Russia?

I personally consider any party not being at power as opposition. In this sense, of course, there is opposition in Russia. The CPRF counts to the opposition. The LDPR also counts to the opposition. Yes, both parties are loyal. But they are not at power. They are separate entities. They go and negotiate. But they are not part of the ruling group. It's not the same thing.

In my opinion, a big problem of our opposition is its snobbery. Oppositional politicians think: “We are the real and true ones, and everyone else is not true because they are not us”. [Following the motto] “Those who are with us are good people, and those who are not with us are bad people”. It seems to me that this stigmatization of everyone else, this attempt to divide the world into black and white, takes a somewhat extreme shape in our opposition. Voters in other countries, democratic ones, are more pragmatic. They can easily switch from one party to another because they just like the program of others better. In Russia it is different. Our snobbery turns extreme.

Our opposition has always emphasized how anti-technological it is. It refused to work with experts, believing that experts are cynical people who have no ideology. Therefore, decisions about the political course and ideology were made by people who don’t understand anything about it. One thing is to stage a show or a performance for the public, but working to get the votes of the electorate is a different thing. Politics shall not be considered as some kind of cultural show. In our country, the democratic opposition was lead by people who treated politics as some kind of performance art.

And what about Navalny?

Navalny was the only one who tried to do it in a technological way, which is why he was imprisoned. Today his influence has significantly decreased because the entire structure he created has been taken apart. There was not enough time for this structure to take root. If they had worked for at least ten years, some kind of network could have been established. But they worked for barely two years, and then everyone was put in jail – naturally the time wasn’t enough to do anything. The time was not enough for his structure to get ingrained in people’s heads, to create a backbone of supporters.

Is it possible to campaign for candidates from outside Russia? Is the role of the expat community important?

I don't see any practical benefit from campaigns organized by Russian political emigrants. They just can't do any campaigning work in Russia today. They can have no campaign headquarters, no leaflets, no supporters in the country. Otherwise they immediately land in jail. The only thing left is, in fact, campaigning online. But the online audience in Russia is limited to big cities. And in truth their campaigns would reach people not in Russia, but in Belarus, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Germany, Israel. There are voters abroad, where they can indeed campaign. But the problem is that the turnout at the polling stations abroad has always been very low. Before 2022 and the accession of the “new regions” about 2% of Russian voters were considered to permanently live abroad. The turnout has always been low, because there are few consular offices in large countries. It’s unlikely that people would travel to New York from Texas to vote. And now there are even less Russian diplomatic missions abroad. Therefore, only those who live close to them will go to vote. So it’s possible to work with such voters, to compile lists of supporters. But how will people vote? Where will they vote? I don't really understand it. The core group of voters still lives inside Russia – and campaigning to win their votes in Russia is currently not possible.

Is it realistic to organize the process of observation at the polling stations?

No, it’s absolutely unrealistic. The recent amendments to the law on presidential elections make the observation process extremely complicated. It’s virtually impossible for the observers to move around the polling station. The appointment of observers is only allowed to the parties that have candidates in these elections and to the candidates themselves. It’s extremely difficult to get approval for the reporters to work on the polling stations. Therefore, there will be very few independent observers. I think that most of them will be representatives of the mainstream opposition. In this sense, the more presidential candidates are registered, the better. The more observers can be appointed by them.

How big is the impact of the remote e-voting going to be?

I think it’s going to be rather substantial. The remote e-voting system is the authorities' main hope for increasing the turnout up to 80%. In the regions with a historically low turnout and in big cities, the remote e-voting system will become their main resource to achieve the desired result.

What should we keep track of during the campaign?

We should keep track of Putin’s next moves, the campaign is not over yet. Of what the others are doing. As if you had a patient – you keep track of his biochemistry test results. So we're going to consider the election campaign as a set of test results of the society.

What are the most peculiar regions to keep an eye on during the campaign and voting?

You should always keep an eye on what's happening in the big cities. Because the backbone of the protest electorate lives in metropolis, in the cities with a million-plus population. That's where the most interesting things happen. So, of course, in terms of global trends, we should keep an eye on Moscow, St. Petersburg, Novosibirsk, Irkutsk, Perm, Samara, and Nizhny Novgorod.

How many voters live in these big cities (of the total number of people eligible to vote)?

Moscow has currently 7.5 million voters. 5 million more live in the Moscow Region. St. Petersburg has 4 million. Altogether, there are around 30 million voters living in the big cities. This number is comparable to the number of voters living in the [allegiant] provinces and in the national republics.

What is the timeframe, at least hypothetically, for any political changes in Russia?

I think that everything will change from within, according to the internal logic. There is going to be a generational change, also within the elites. According to the conservative approach, this is expected to happen in 10-15 years. Which seems pessimistic to me. It would mean that those who were 25 years old in 2020 would be completely deprived of active political life.

Could any strong changes in the global economic structure, for instance, green transition, accelerate changes in Russia?

Economic problems can always become a natural accelerator of political changes, especially if they undermine the government's ability to pay for the loyalty of its core supporters. However, the experience has proven that even in very poor countries, there is usually enough money to pay for the political loyalty. For example, Venezuela's political regime has survived for many years, even though Venezuela is a poor country. Nevertheless, there is enough money to support those receiving the state aid.