Putin heads for another term: what we need to know about elections in Russia

Russia is holding presidential elections that will certainly prolong Vladimir Putin's rule throughout this decade and into the 2030s.

Voting will be held over three days: from March 15 (March 14 at 5pm GMT) to March 17, although early and postal voting has already begun, including in occupied parts of Ukraine where forces Russian women are trying to exert authority.

But this is not a normal election; the vote is essentially a constitutional exercise that holds no prospect of removing Putin from power.

The president's grip on the Russian electoral system has already been strengthened as the elections approach. The country's only anti-war candidate was barred from running, and Alexei Navalny, the poisoned and jailed former opposition leader who was the most prominent voice against Putin in Russia, died last month.

That said, here's what you need to know about the election.

When and where will the election take place?

Voting will take place from Friday, March 15th (March 14th at 5pm Brasília time) until Sunday, March 17th. Early voting took place earlier, including among Russia's expatriate population around the world.

Voting was also organized in the four Ukrainian regions that Russia said it would annex in September 2022 in violation of international law. Russia has already held regional votes and referendums in these occupied territories, an effort rejected by the international community as a sham, but which the Kremlin considers fundamental to its “Russification” campaign.

A second round of voting would take place three weeks after this weekend if no candidate gets more than half the votes, although it will be a big surprise if that is necessary. Russians are electing only the office of president; The next legislative elections, which make up the Duma, the Russian parliament, are scheduled for 2026.

How long has Putin been in power?

Putin signed a law in 2021 that allowed him to run for two more presidential terms, potentially extending his rule until 2036, after a referendum the previous year gave permission to reset the clock on his term limits. This election will mark the beginning of the first of these two extra terms.

He has essentially been the country's head of state throughout the 21st century, rewriting the rules and conventions of Russia's political system to expand and extend his powers. This already makes him Russia's longest-serving ruler since Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.

Putin's previous efforts to maintain control included a 2008 constitutional amendment that extended presidential terms from four to six years, and a temporary job swap with his then-prime minister Dmitry Medvedev the same year that preceded a quick return. to the presidency in 2012.

Is Putin popular in Russia?

Truly gauging popular opinion is notoriously difficult in Russia, where the few independent think tanks operate under strict surveillance and where, even in a legitimate poll, many Russians are afraid to criticize the Kremlin.

But Putin has undoubtedly reaped the rewards of a political landscape dramatically tilted in his favor. The Levada Center, a non-governmental polling organization, reports that Putin's approval rating is over 80% – an astonishing number, almost unknown among Western politicians, and a substantial increase in the three-year period before the invasion of Ukraine.

The invasion gave Putin a nationalist message around which to rally Russians, bolstering his own image, and even as Russia's campaign faltered throughout 2023, the war maintained widespread support.

National security is Russians' priority. Ukrainian attacks on Russia's border regions have brought war into the country for many people, but support for the invasion – euphemistically called a “special military operation” by Russia's leaders – remains high.

The Levada Center concluded in late 2023 that “rising inflation and rising food prices could have a lasting impact on the mood of Russians,” with the proportion of Russians cutting spending increasing.

But that doesn't mean that Russians expect the elections to change the country's course. Putin benefits enormously from apathy; Most Russians have never witnessed a democratic transfer of power between rival political parties in a traditional presidential election, and expressions of anger against the Kremlin are rare enough to keep much of the population disinterested in politics.

Putin's former speechwriter Abbas Gallyamov told CNN last month that discontent against the president was rising in Russia. Gallyamov said Putin is trying to eliminate opposition leaders from society to at least ensure that such discontent remains “unstructured,” “disorganized” and “leaderless” before future elections.

Who else is running?

Russian election candidates are strictly controlled by the Central Election Commission (CEC), allowing Putin to run in a favorable field and reducing the potential for an opposition candidate to gain momentum.

The same happens this year. “Each candidate presents overlapping ideologies and domestic policies, but collectively they fuel Putin’s goal of tightening control over Russia during his next presidential term,” wrote Callum Fraser of the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) think tank.

Nikolay Kharitonov will represent the Communist Party, which has been allowed to field a candidate in every election this century but has not won even a fifth of the votes since Putin's first presidential election.

Two other Duma politicians, Leonid Slutsky and Vladislav Davankov, are also running. Davankov is deputy speaker of the State Duma, the lower house of Russia's parliament, while Slutsky represents the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, the party formerly led by ultranationalist firebrand Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who died in 2022. All are considered reliably pro-Kremlin.

But there is no candidate who opposes Putin's war in Ukraine; Boris Nadezhdin, previously the only anti-war figure, was barred from running by the CEC in February after the body claimed he had not received enough legitimate signatures to nominate his candidacy.

In December, another independent candidate who spoke out openly against the war in Ukraine, Yekaterina Duntsova, was rejected by the CEC, citing alleged errors in her campaign group's registration documents. Later, Duntsova appealed to people to support Nadezhdin's candidacy.

Writing on social media in February, opposition activist and former Navalny aide Leonid Volkov dismissed the elections as a “circus,” saying they were intended to signal the masses’ overwhelming support for Putin.

“We need to understand what the March 'elections' mean for Putin. They are a propaganda effort to spread hopelessness among the electorate,” Volkov said.

Volkov was attacked in front of his home on Tuesday (12) in the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius. Lithuania's intelligence agency said it believed the attack on Navalny's former aide Leonid Volkov was likely “organized by Russia.”

The Kremlin refused to comment on the attack on Volkov on Thursday (14).

Are elections fair?

Elections in Russia are neither free nor fair and essentially serve as a formality to extend Putin's term in power, according to independent bodies and observers inside and outside the country.

Putin's successful campaigns were, in part, the result of “preferential treatment of the media, numerous abuses of office, and procedural irregularities during vote counting,” according to Freedom House, a global democracy watchdog.

Outside of election cycles, the Kremlin's propaganda machine has targeted voters with occasionally hysterical pro-Putin material, and many news sites based outside Russia were blocked following the invasion of Ukraine, although younger, more seasoned voters in technology, have become accustomed to using VPNs to access them.

Protests are also heavily restricted, making public expression of opposition a dangerous and rare occurrence.

Then, as elections approach, true opposition candidates almost inevitably find their candidacies withdrawn or are barred from running for public office, as Nadezhdin and Duntsova discovered during that cycle.

“Opposition politicians and activists are often targets of trumped-up criminal prosecutions and other forms of administrative harassment designed to impede their participation in the political process,” Freedom House noted in its latest global report.

How did Navalny's death affect the preparation for the elections?

The timing of the death of Alexey Navalny – Putin's most prominent critic – served to emphasize the control that Russia's leader exercises over his country's politics.

In one of Navalny's last court appearances before his death, he encouraged prison service officials to “vote against Putin.” “I have a suggestion: vote for any candidate other than Putin. To vote against Putin, simply vote for any other candidate,” he said on February 8.

Navalny's death cast an ominous shadow over the campaign. Navalny's widow, Yulia Navalnaya, encouraged the European Union “not to recognize the elections” in an impassioned speech to its Council on Foreign Relations, just days after she was widowed.

“Putin killed my husband exactly one month before the so-called elections. These elections are fake, but Putin still needs them. For advertising. He wants the whole world to believe that everyone in Russia supports and admires him. Don’t believe this propaganda,” she said.

Thousands of people then gathered for Navalny's funeral in Moscow, despite the threat of arrest by Russian authorities.

Navalnaya urged the Russian people to turn out at noon on the final day of the elections, March 17, as a form of protest. In a video posted on social media, Navalnaya told Russians that they could “vote for any candidate besides Putin, you can cancel your vote, you can write Navalny on the ballots.”

She added that Russians did not need to vote, but could “stay at a polling place and then go home… the most important thing is to go.”

*With information from CNN's Anna Chernova, Pauline Lockwood and Mariya Knight.