Will Putin be fazed by noon rebellion?
It almost seems pointless to say it, but yesterday was the first day of the Russian presidential elections.
Pointless, because Vladimir Putin’s team has already said they expect the incumbent president to win 80 per cent of the vote. Therefore, 80 per cent of the vote he will win, there seems little question about that.
Yet, for those Russians who do not want Mr Putin to serve a fifth term in office, which could pave the way for him staying in power until 2030 – making him overtake Josef Stalin to become Russia’s longest-serving leader – there is a rebellion movement that is growing apace on social media.
Never able to put himself forward as a candidate for this election, the late Alexei Navalny had been behind bars since 2021. His previous attempt to stand against Mr Putin, in 2018, saw him barred from running due to claims of a previous criminal conviction – and an alleged poisoning two years later, from which he recovered.
On February 1, 15 days before his death in a Siberian penal colony, Mr Navalny got a message through to his X account urging his supporters to execute an act of defiance against Mr Putin.
“I like the idea of anti-putin voters going to the polling stations together at 12 noon,” Navalny wrote. “At noon against Putin.”
Now, “Noon against Putin” has become an election slogan taken up by the minority of vocal critics of Mr Putin. The plan called for anyone who is against Mr Putin to wait until tomorrow – the last day of voting – and turn up at noon, making a protest vote
Mr Navalny’s widow Yulia Navalnaya has taken up the cause since her husband’s death. “The choice is yours, you can vote for any candidate except Putin,” Ms Navalnaya said in a Youtube video. “You can ruin the ballot, you can write ‘Navalny’ in big letters on it. And even if you don’t see the point in voting at all, you can just come and stand at the polling station, and then turn around and go home.”
Ms Navalnaya is not the only group calling for a boycott of the elections.
The Ukrainian government has, unsurprisingly, urged people in the occupied areas of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson – as well as Crimea, annexed by Russia in 2014 – not to take part and to stay away from areas near polling stations while voting is taking place.
There is no doubt Mr Putin will win. Yet he wants more than that – he wants to believe the citizens of the “new Russia”, otherwise regarded as occupied parts of Ukraine, back him. On paper, publicly, at least, they will, there is no other choice. Yet whether Mr Putin gets the reassurance he wants is something only he will know.