Vladimir Putin is up for re-election. At the time of writing, the outcome is unclear: Is Putin going to get 93 percent of the vote, or will the Kremlin settle for a cool—and totally reasonable—82 percent? At one point during the 2011 parliamentary elections, Russian-state-media polls showed 146 percent in favor of the ruling party, so no number is off the table—only the idea that this election is free, fair, or real.
“Our presidential election is not really democracy; it’s costly bureaucracy,” said Putin’s spokesperson Dmitri Peskov, in an interview for The New York Times in August of last year. Peskov, known for telling the truth with the frequency of a solar eclipse, is right. Be it a babushka in Siberia or the C.I.A. station chief in Moscow, no one will be surprised by the outcome.
The biggest question about Election 2024, Russia edition, isn’t who’s going to win and by what margin, but why it’s happening in the first place. Does a neo-totalitarian dictatorship like Russia’s really need campaigns, polls, and competing candidates? Doesn’t the Kremlin have anything better to do, like bombing maternity wards in Ukraine or slowly killing off opposition leaders at home? But Putin, whose obsession with the letter of the law is matched only by his disregard for its spirit, still wants you to vote.
Putin’s campaign slogan, “Russia. Putin. 2024,” is a fresh take on the Louis XIV quote “I am the State.” The campaign imagery mirrors the regal statement: billboards show poster views of Russian landmarks, accompanied by the slogan and election dates. There’s not a single photo of Putin the candidate (apparently, the Kremlin is trying to avoid showing the old man to a weary audience), but Putin the leader is everywhere: all across Moscow, humongous screens play his speeches, interviews, and his trademark takes on geopolitics, such as “Russia’s borders do not end anywhere.”
In the election, Putin will face off against three competitors, each carefully chosen by the Kremlin to represent a political movement in Russia without posing even a minor threat to the incumbent president: it’s the Kremlin version of Marie Antoinette’s fake farm, Hameau de La Reine. Nikolay Kharitonov, a Communist, whose campaign slogan is “We had fun with capitalism, but enough is enough,” is one. Leonid Slutsky, M.P., the leader of the ultra-nationalist L.D.P.R. party, who stands accused by multiple female political correspondents of sexual harassment, is another. And finally, Vladislav Davankov, from the New People party—he’s supposed to attract the opposition vote, including by copying Navalny’s campaign signage (teal blue and red). Needless to say, Putin’s competitors refrained from criticizing him or the war in Ukraine, and none of them are expected to cross the 6 percent mark—may God help them if they do.
A parallel campaign, aimed at increasing voter turnout, is focused on Russia’s unity, timelessness, and supremacy. Echoing Soviet agitprop, there are posters with kids studying that exhort, A Time to Learn; posters with rockets and farmlands that say, The Time of Russia; and ones featuring a happy family—A Time to Choose.
While not part of the election, the numerous advertisements calling for men to enlist in the army complement Putin’s campaign, seemingly implying that it’s also a time to die.
But Putin, whose obsession with the letter of the law is matched only by his disregard for its spirit, still wants you to vote.
“Russia’s performance on the battlefield in Ukraine hasn’t changed the campaign at all,” says Andrey Pertsev, political correspondent for the independent news outlet Meduza. “[The Kremlin’s] political bloc tried to minimize the war as much as possible, although, of course, it couldn’t completely eliminate it, due to Putin’s enthusiasm for war.”
The death of Russia’s leading opposition figure, Alexei Navalny, barely affected the polls, with Putin’s ratings suffering only a minor blow. “Based on a Levada poll, Navalny’s death saddened or outraged 20 percent of the respondents, roughly the same number of people who are against the war in Ukraine, as per another Levada poll. Either way [for the Kremlin] it’s a disloyal electorate,” says Pertsev.
Political analysts and sources in Moscow agree that the campaign is essentially empty and carried out pro forma, with a key performance indicator for the Kremlin being voter turnout reaching 70 percent or more. The coercion mechanism, aimed at getting government employees, employees of state-controlled corporations, and loyal business owners to vote, is well established.
Party members are instructed to bring a certain number of people with them when they vote, and company C.E.O.’s are responsible for busing their employees to the voting stations. A novel way to keep tabs on those considering skipping the vote is through unique QR codes distributed to employees. On the day of the election, a state employee has to present his or her personal code to “exit pollsters,” who scan it as proof of attendance.
The percentage of votes for Putin isn’t tied to the ballots; in his years in power, voter fraud has been perfected through ballot-stuffing, online voting, and a ban on independent observers. The number of votes that Putin gets is decided by the Kremlin in a balancing act between a plausible show of national unity and that of a Pyongyang-level dictatorship. In the words of a Moscow source, “Eighty percent is a lot, but at least it’s not 90.”
The 2024 presidential election in Russia isn’t about projecting an image of Putin as a legitimate ruler to a wide audience. At home, Putin is regarded as the national leader; his friends in Budapest and Tehran will accept him no matter the atrocities he commits, and his foes in Kyiv, Brussels, and Washington have no illusions about Vladimir Putin—or suffrage in a neo-Fascist regime.
But this election isn’t meant for any of them. “Putin likes plebiscites. He likes seeing popular support,” says Pertsev, “but chances are, he has no idea about how this show of support comes to be.” Why is this election happening? The answer is because it’s not an election at all, simply a multi-million-dollar production of a one-man show—put on for a one-man audience. An exercise in solipsism worthy of the Sun King.
Andrew Ryvkin is a screenwriter, journalist, and Russian-affairs specialist
