Putin’s unsurprising victory
The Russian president engineers an election win. Matthew Partridge reports
Russian president Vladimir Putin has “extended his rule over Russia until 2030” after winning a “heavily stage-managed presidential election with no real competition”, say Anton Troianovski and Nanna Heitmann in The New York Times. Official results suggest that Putin won 87% of the vote – an even higher number than in the four previous elections he participated in – but many governments around the world condemned the elections as “not free nor fair”. Experts agree that this was the least-transparent election in recent Russian history. Many votes were cast in occupied Ukraine, “under the watch of armed Russian soldiers”.
Shamelessly rigged
Even by the standards of past Russian elections, the vote was “shamelessly rigged” and credible opposition figures were either “excluded on technicalities” or, in the case of Alexei Navalny, already dead, says The Guardian. In their place were three “Kremlin-approved” candidates, who “made no attempt to win”. The exclusions, the intimidation, as well as Putin’s “laughable” margin of victory, all show that “the limited space for dissent and political competition that existed in the first years of his rule has disappeared” and the resumption of Soviet-era totalitarian control is “all but complete”.
Yet there are signs that Putin’s hold over the Russian people is not absolute, says The Economist. A significant number of people made the symbolic protest of turning up together to vote at the stroke of noon, despite warnings and “threats” that anyone who did so “would suffer consequences”. In some places queues of those taking part in these so-called “noon against Putin” protests stretched “for hundreds of metres”. These gestures “could not alter the Kremlin’s predetermined result”, but they do “affect the perception of Putin’s legitimacy in the eyes of many Russians, including some of his own bureaucrats”.
Sidestepping sanctions
Like the brief mutiny by Yevgeny Prigozhin last year, the election protests, as well as Putin’s general “jumpiness”, suggest that his regime may be more “brittle” than it appears, says the Financial Times. For now, though, Putin remains “a threat to Europe, and the world”, and “repression at home is running hand in hand with a more belligerent policy abroad”. And despite the long-term damage from “losing Western markets for Russian energy, triggering an exodus of foreign businesses and incurring sanctions”, Russia has been more successful than many expected “in shifting the economy onto a war footing”.
Putin is now likely to use the election victory to supply “some spurious legitimacy for a general mobilisation”, so the West needs to step up its game, says The Times. In particular, its approach to financial warfare “has to be on target, its diplomacy towards Moscow’s useful allies must be sharper, its co-operation with the Ukrainian armed forces more reliable and on an industrial scale”. Ducking such a responsibility “will only reward the warmongers”.