Yesterday was another Single Voting Day (Russia’s nationwide election day), and there will be plenty of analytical articles about it_, but I’ll briefly write about my first impressions._
On the internet and Twitter, of course, people are talking mostly about the Moscow City Duma—just the usual Moscow-centric bias—but the main races in this election were St. Petersburg and Zhukovsky.
In St. Petersburg, the real challenger to United Russia’s Poltavchenko was removed, and they put up not just spoiler candidates but outright puppets. The result was entirely predictable:
Turnout was 39%, including a full 10% early voting (read: “forced voting by state employees”).
At the same time, no one in St. Petersburg was calling for a boycott, and there were relatively competitive municipal elections held alongside the gubernatorial race. A boycott by the politically conscious part of the population happened de facto.
This is the most important thing that everyone now writing “idiot boycotters, because of them some candidates didn’t get through” needs to understand. The main thing in that position is absolute contempt for voters—the assumption that they are so brainless that they’ll run wherever they’re told, won’t assess the situation for themselves, and will learn everything from celebrity blogs.
No—everyone understands politics; any random person off the street will give you a whole pile of political advice. And the situation I wrote about in this long post, where I described the authorities’ new election strategy—“I decide who your opposition candidate is, and you can rally around them and try to win”—is something any St. Petersburg resident standing on the curb understands perfectly well without me.
Let’s be honest, looking at the picture above: there is no rational argument for taking part in this. No one is going to rally around Petrov, Sukhenko, or Bikbayev. It’s obvious that even with 100% turnout, Poltavchenko would still have “defeated” his handpicked weirdos.
This situation is possible above all because of collusion between “United Russia” and the “systemic opposition” (the officially tolerated opposition parties). That collusion will be the main obstacle in the coming campaigns and the main demotivating factor for voters, whom it will be extremely hard for us to persuade otherwise.
In other regions, it’s the same or even worse. We are seeing the “Chechenization of elections” in ethnically Russian regions:
In Zhukovsky, by contrast, everything was exactly the opposite. The local YABLOKO party set aside its ambitions and offered its slate to “people’s candidates”—all the local activists with real support were included. The result: unprecedented falsifications, the removal of election commission members, and all the rest of it. In the best traditions of Moscow Region. A real battle is going on there right now, and I very much hope they can win back at least some of the results.
I’ll write about Moscow too, but briefly for now. As I pointed out here, the collusion between the “systemic parties” and the mayor’s office—which resulted in the strongest candidates being kept off the lists and every party fielding candidates in all 45 districts—made exactly the impression on voters you would expect. The elections in Moscow took place with the lowest turnout in history.
Interestingly, the only party that managed to benefit from these shameful separate deals was the Communist Party (KPRF)—it picked up seats even in districts “allocated” to A Just Russia, YABLOKO, and Prokhorov’s people.
How can one not recall my appeal to the Communist Party and YABLOKO to include independent candidates on their lists.
YABLOKO ended up with the larger share of the broken trough—they shoved aside a lot of people in exchange for a guaranteed seat for Andrei Babushkin (a good man), stuffed their list with technical candidates and staffers who had been approved by the mayor’s office under one key condition: “the candidate must not be able to win.” And in the end they got nothing.
There were, of course, several people there who posted truly outstanding results (Grigorov, Rusakova, Goncharov, Galyamina), but overall it was a game played in Sobyanin’s candidates’ favor.
Talking about the “signature-gathering filter” is laughable at this point; it has now become obvious just how thoroughly that filter was overcome only by Rakova’s pencil (that is, through administrative approval). Candidates who “successfully and effectively” collected more than 5,000 signatures in support of their nomination ended up getting 700 votes in the election.
There is still a great deal to write about the Moscow elections; there’s a lot here to study from a campaign-technology point of view: Klychkov’s triumph (a real one), beating the prefect; Baburin’s astonishing result, taking second place with 24.3% without even running a campaign; Grigorov, Rusakova, Galyamina, and Goncharov, who somehow managed to get 20–25% without money or media; Maxim Katz’s very interesting campaign, and so on. There’s no point trying to cram all of that into one post.
The conclusions that, it seems to me, can already be drawn now:
1) Despite Putin’s much-touted 84 percent in the polls, his cronies can win elections only by removing strong candidates and falsifying the vote.
2) The removal of candidates and the tactic of “we decide who the opposition is, and you support them” is becoming dominant, unfortunately with the active support of the “systemic” parties, which have been granted the right to nominate candidates without collecting signatures.
Whether we like it or not, a spontaneous boycott by voters in general—and by the more politically engaged voter above all—will be the main response to this tactic. Especially in gubernatorial elections. It is hardly realistic to resist this. People do not want to rally around obviously weak candidates or candidates who themselves do not particularly want to win. We will not drive them to the polling stations or lure them there with treats.
Our top priority demand must be precisely free access to elections, whereas right now everyone is focused only on supporting what is available: “Well, these people were allowed to run, so let’s kill ourselves trying to raise their share from 15 to 17 percent, so the United Russia candidate wins with 39 instead of 42.”
To implement point 4, we need to drastically increase political pressure on the “systemic opposition,” which uses slogans and sentiments like “you still have to go vote” to hand everything over to United Russia in exchange for a couple of guaranteed seats. It is important to make them understand that if they refuse to put forward consolidated slates, the boycott will be very real. If we fail to explain this, then in the State Duma elections we will see a situation where Putin and Volodin hand some nominal YABLOKO 3–4 guaranteed districts for some nominal Yavlinsky and his entourage, and in return that nominal YABLOKO once again fields some 221 obscure nobodies, around whom we will supposedly have to rally with bulging eyes. All the while understanding that those nobodies have no chance anyway, but trying to push that thought away.
6) Mechanisms for primaries, polling, and electronic voting need to be developed and implemented as widely as possible so that we can understand campaign frontrunners more accurately. The results of this one showed that they were not the people we thought they were. This is very important: resources are scarce, they need to be allocated rationally, and districts should be “divided up” only on the basis of solid research.
7) (most importantly) taking point 1 into account, we should once again recognize that the current political system does not allow for an honest independent candidate to win an election. Elections are a crucial element of our struggle, but not the only one. Canvassing, persuasion, and building grassroots network structures are all essential; they are not as exciting or inspiring as elections, but without them nothing will work.