Vladimir Putin will continue to lead Russia. The 2018 presidential election has confirmed him as president: he will remain in office for another six years.
Update 19 March, 8am – Vladimir Putin obtained approximately 76 per cent of the vote. Three in four voters in Russia, therefore, are on his side. Turnout did not reach 70 per cent but came close to the target the government had set itself: 67.4 per cent took part.
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Without any surprise, Russia's "tsar" Vladimir Putin was re-elected at 65 to a new term leading his country. He will be president of the Euro-Asian nation for another six years, until 2024. The leader, who has held power continuously since 2000, will by that point have spent a quarter of a century as head of state (or prime minister, during the presidency of Dmitri Medvedev, between 2008 and 2012).
But if the outcome of the presidential and legislative elections on Sunday 18 March was easily foreseeable, Putin's objective was to consolidate his power, securing a free hand for his final term. To that end, he was aiming for the "70-70": 70 per cent of votes in his favour and 70 per cent turnout. Both results were substantially achieved. While the exact share of voters — out of the nearly 109 million called upon to vote — who went to the polls has not yet been made official, it appears certain that Putin won over more than seven in ten voters. According to the polling institute Fom, the Russian president obtained 76.3 per cent. The Central Electoral Commission, however, gives him victory with 71.97 per cent, based on 21.3 per cent of ballots counted.
That turnout (at least the official figure) would be high had been apparent since the morning: at 2pm local time (12pm in Italy) the turnout figure stood at 34.72 per cent, up on the 2012 count. At 6pm Moscow time, the rate was then reported at 52.71 per cent by the Central Electoral Commission: four points higher than the previous election. And in the regions of the Russian Far East, where voting had already ended, the news agency Tass had reported figures above 60 or 70 per cent. This was made possible by the enormous media campaign ordered by the government, but also by the pressure exerted on certain categories — students above all — to go and vote.
The specialist NGO Golos had spoken of voting imposed on employees or entire universities, of buses organised by the police to bring citizens to polling stations, and even of discount vouchers distributed to "incentivise" the undecided. But what drove voters to confirm Putin in power? According to Isabelle Mandraud, Moscow correspondent for the French daily Le Monde, "the main ace up the Russian leader's sleeve is the absence of a credible alternative." The main rival and opponent of the former Soviet intelligence agent, Alexei Navalny, was declared ineligible by the electoral commission.
He was the only figure who could have made the results even slightly less of a foregone conclusion. Although unable to participate in the elections, the anti-Putin activist deployed 33,000 observers across Russia to monitor possible electoral fraud: by 2pm, Golos had already reported 1,839 cases of irregularities at the polls. Several videos published online would appear to show instances of fraud.
Navalny also contested the turnout figures: as early as Sunday afternoon he had spoken of "real figures ten per cent lower than those reported by the government." In a tweet, Piotr Verzilov, one of the observers present in Chechnya, cited data from four polling stations in Grozny, with turnout figures ranging between 29 and 38 per cent.
The legislative elections, following an amendment passed on 5 April 2016, are held alongside the presidential election and serve to renew the mandates of the 450 deputies in Russia's lower house, the Duma. The system is mixed: half of the parliamentarians are elected on a proportional basis, in a single constituency with a 5 per cent threshold; the other half in single-member majority constituencies in a single round. In 2012, Putin's United Russia Nationalist Party obtained 63.6% of the vote, which allowed the Russian leader to secure 140 deputies out of the 225 in the proportional quota.[/box]
The other candidates running against Putin were six men and one woman. Pavel Grudinin, 58, stood for the Communist Party and came second. An agricultural entrepreneur heading a farming centre founded in 1917 by Lenin and privatised in 1995, he had supported Putin in 2000 but had since withdrawn entirely from the ruling United Russia Nationalist Party. He received over 11 per cent of the vote.
The oldest of the candidates was Vladimir Zhirinovsky, 71, president and founder of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia. He stood on an ultra-nationalist platform, with antisemitic and xenophobic undertones. The only woman in the race was Ksenia Sobchak, daughter of the former mayor of St Petersburg Anatoli Sobchak: her position was firmly hostile to Putin, but since her father was considered a mentor of the leader, the 36-year-old was labelled "a Kremlin puppet" by her detractors.
Vladimir Putin was born in St Petersburg (at the time Leningrad) on 7 October 1952. His parents, Spiridonovitch Putin and Maria Ivanovna Putina, were of modest origins. His father had been a Red Army soldier and had fought to defend Leningrad against the Nazi army during the Second World War; his mother had survived the 827-day siege of the city. Both had subsequently been taken on at the local railway factory.
Putin would try to be taken on by the KGB, the Soviet secret services, for the first time at just 16 years of age, without success. Then, after a period of training about which little is known, he managed to enter the counter-espionage services. In 1985 he was sent to Dresden, where he would remain until 1990, operating under the code name "Officer Platov". His firm hand in defending the KGB offices in the city at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall became famous: Putin went to confront the rebels who had turned up outside the gates of the building, convincing them that it was decidedly better for them to desist. In 1990 he was ordered to return to Leningrad, by then holding the rank of KGB lieutenant colonel, in the midst of the implosion of the USSR.
A friend advised him at that point to turn to Anatoli Sobchak, who had just been elected to head the Lensoviet, the city council (which would shortly revert to being called St Petersburg). Putin resigned from the KGB and became his assistant. Putin entered the Kremlin for the first time as a simple collaborator, in 1996, within Boris Yeltsin's presidential administration — Yeltsin being the first president of the post-Soviet era. In 1998 he was appointed director of the FSB, the new secret services of the Russian Federation. In 1999 he became prime minister, and on 23 March 2000 he was elected president for the first time. During his first two terms the leader made use of the momentum of a growing economy and the resulting satisfaction of the population. In 2008 he could not stand again, as the Russian Constitution prohibits serving more than two consecutive terms. His protégé Dmitry Medvedev was elected, and would choose Putin himself as prime minister. In 2012, he was elected president for the third time: this time for six years.
The other candidates who stood in the 2018 presidential election were Grigory Yavlinsky, a 65-year-old economist who worked with the reformers during Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika era and who in 1993 co-founded the liberal democratic party Yabloko, popular among a certain section of the Russian intelligentsia. Then there was businessman Boris Titov, 57, founder of the Party of Growth (liberal-conservative), who stood "not against Putin" but to make the voice of business heard.
Sergei Baburin, 59, had been a people's deputy in Russia's last Supreme Soviet in 1990: he was one of the seven parliamentarians to have voted against the dissolution of the USSR. Subsequently re-elected to the Duma, he founded the party People's Will (today the Union of the Russian People). Baburin publicly supported the Serb Radovan Karadžić, regarded as the "butcher of the Balkans". Finally, Maxim Suraykin, 40, stood in the election as chairman of the Communists of Russia party, of Marxist-Leninist inspiration, basing his electoral campaign on posters depicting former Soviet leader Stalin.
The weakness of the opposition allowed Putin to run what has been described as a "non-campaign". The Russian leader snubbed television debates and kept his public appearances to a minimum, focusing on a "strong" speech delivered before the Duma on 1 March, during which he had spoken — among other things — of new "invincible" missiles being developed by the Russian army. He also indicated the goal of increasing per-capita gross domestic product, but did not state how he intends to do so.
