No surprise here: Putin wins again
Russia’s president cruises to fourth term with about 75% of the vote
Moscow — Vladimir Putin cruised to victory Sunday for another six-year presidential term after an election that was long on spectacle and short on suspense.
From the Arctic to the International Space Station, Russia rolled out an elaborate presidential-election-day display designed to show the breadth of Putin’s public support as he extended his tenure for a fourth term to 2024.
Putin’s opponents on Sunday’s ballot included a nationalist, a Communist, and two liberals. But Putin barely campaigned, opposition activist Alexei Navalny was barred from the ballot, and reports of ballot-stuffing and people ordered to vote by their employers rolled in throughout the day.
With about two thirds of the ballots counted, more than 75 percent were for Putin, according to the Central Election Commission. The runner up was Communist Party candidate Pavel Grudinin with 12.7 percent.
“Success awaits us!” Putin told supporters in central Moscow. “Together, we will get to work on a great, massive scale, in the name of Russia.”
The biggest question as Russians went to the polls on Sunday was the level of turnout, and uncertainty on the final tally lingered into the night in Moscow. While independent surveys show that most Russians continue to approve of Putin as president, a lack of suspense or popular opposition candidates threatened to keep people home. The Kremlin, analysts say, was looking for high turnout to deliver legitimacy for another Putin term.
At 6 p.m. Moscow time, Russia’s Central Election Commission said, nationwide turnout stood at 59.9 percent — just above the level in the 2012 election at that time.
Russian cities have been plastered with billboards touting Sunday’s election — “Your country, our president, our choice!” Some cities made public transportation free on Sunday, and social-media posts from Russia’s far-flung regions showed free food and giveaways at polling places. In Khabarovsk in Russia’s Far East, the regional government organized a food festival to coincide with the vote that, at one polling place, was to include a “presidential breakfast” featuring skim-milk oatmeal with regional pine nuts.
Putin himself cast his ballot at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow. Asked what result he was hoping for, he responded: “Any that gives me the right to fulfill the duty of president.”
Russian state TV broadcast images of lines of Russian beachgoers voting in Thailand, a polling place in the mountains of Dagestan, mothers casting their ballots at a maternity ward, and a helicopter delivering ballots to remote settlements in the Arctic. A Russian on the International Space Station was reported to have voted while in orbit. A state TV journalist reporting live from the southern city of Rostov-on-Don cast his ballot on camera — “I have done my civic duty,” he said.