Vladimir Putin met with Central Election Commission chair Ella Pamfilova on the day of the lottery that assigns places on the State Duma ballot. United Russia will take the top spot, Yabloko the second. The LDPR lands third, the CPRF eighth, A Just Russia sixth, and New People last, in eleventh place.
This is the first time United Russia has drawn the top line in a federal election, even though the ruling party has enjoyed such “luck” with striking regularity in regional races. Experts have repeatedly pointed out that these outcomes defy the laws of probability. Political technologists estimate that the first position can deliver an extra 1−2 percent of the vote.
In regional campaigns, where the administrative resource is usually kept in reserve so as not to exhaust it before federal contests, such manipulations were long considered tolerable. At the federal level they risked provoking a scandal from the systemic opposition (local scandals of this kind have already occurred), and an extra 1−2 percent was apparently judged too modest a prize to justify the potential backlash.
The situation has changed. With United Russia’s rating low—and, unlike in previous federal campaigns, showing no growth during the pre-election period—those 1−2 percent are no longer surplus to requirements if the party is to meet the KPI set by the Presidential Administration’s political bloc. To publicly deflect suspicions of ballot-box sleight of hand, Ella Pamfilova felt obliged to remind Putin of the Communists’ earlier good fortune.
“You know, this is the first time for United Russia. The CPRF drew the first ball two times in a row,” the CEC chair stressed.
The “author” of the United Russia success was the wrestler Alexander Karelin, a relatively popular figure. That detail is also intended to blunt the inevitable and entirely justified suspicions. United Russia has received its head start precisely when the party and the Kremlin can make real use of it.
Moreover, Ella Pamfilova, acting as an ally of the Kremlin’s political bloc (which insists the elections must go ahead despite the presence of security-service advocates of postponement), once again secured Vladimir Putin’s backing for holding the vote on schedule. She thanked the president for his instructions on ensuring the security of wartime elections and received the reply: “Ella Alexandrovna, those who want to go through the democratic procedures of forming power do so despite any threats. Those who do not will always find pretexts not to.”
The political and information blocs of the Kremlin—the principal operators of the elections and their chief beneficiaries—know exactly which of the president’s sensitivities to press. Vladimir Putin regularly stresses that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is an illegitimate ruler because his term has expired and no presidential election has been held. Under Ukrainian law, elections are not conducted in wartime. For Putin, however, Zelensky’s “illegitimacy,” supposedly stemming from a breach of electoral deadlines, has long become a fetish. Demonstratively holding elections in Russia is the reverse side of the same fetish: the Russian head of state is thereby seeking to underline his supposed superiority over his Ukrainian counterpart.
After Putin’s conversation with Pamfilova—during which even campaigning for turnout on metro trains, Russian Railways facilities and certain “funiculars” was discussed—the scenario of postponing the vote looks virtually unrealizable, unless unexpected negative developments occur on the front or in the economy.
Sobyanin versus Lavrov
The lead candidates on the United Russia list—Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin—gave programmatic interviews to TASS director-general Andrei Kondrashov. The mayor did so this past week; the foreign minister at the end of July. Sobyanin’s remarks proved far louder and more widely discussed. The most-quoted passage concerned the possible conversion of the Russian economy onto a war footing.
“We constantly hear talk about mobilizing the entire economy, turning it toward war and so on. But a modern economy is structured differently. Without a peacetime economy there will be no taxes, no household incomes, the political situation will be completely different, and we will not succeed in the war either. To kill normal life, to kill a normal economy, is to kill the country altogether. These are therefore unnecessary, worthless conversations conducted by people who do not understand how a modern economy and a modern war actually work,” Sobyanin declared.
Any question put by a state media outlet to a high-ranking Russian official is cleared with the official’s press service, and the answers are carefully prepared in advance—all the more so when the interview is a programmatic pre-election statement. Sobyanin’s remarks are designed to reassure a war-weary public that is constantly irritated by the demands of military correspondents and other ultra-patriots to “fight for real” and put the economy on a war footing. Only recently such calls were voiced by Andrei Kolesnik, a United Russia deputy chair of the State Duma defense committee (who, incidentally, did not make the party’s list for the new parliament).
The Moscow mayor, who is not directly associated with the war in the public mind, plays the role of a kind of therapist who speaks mainly about “normal” life. He embodies the status quo that civilian authorities are straining every sinew to preserve: war separately, peaceful life separately. Even when discussing the occupied territories, Sobyanin talks of the return of “normal, peaceful life.” He also mentions Moscow’s assistance to the regions, and the message is easily read: even if a territory finds itself in crisis, the “big capital brother” stands ready to help it and its governor. In addition, Sobyanin positions himself as a measured voice on the socially sensitive issue of migration, telling Kondrashov about the “Amina” app that labor migrants are obliged to install; it tracks their location and effectively monitors their movements.
The audience Sobyanin is addressing is not hard to identify. It consists of war-weary ordinary citizens, both in the capital and in the provinces, who do not regard the war as the “new normal” and would like a return to the previous life. The mayor may also be addressing Vladimir Putin himself, speaking on behalf of civilian elites who fear the conversion of the country onto a war footing.
Lavrov addresses a different audience—ultra-patriots and supporters of the war. In his remarks he took aim at Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, the “collective West,” and the Baltic states in particular. The minister also allowed himself to dream of greater “anger” in Russian foreign policy.
In effect, the two lead candidates on the United Russia list act as antagonists. Lavrov works the “patriotic” audience and talks of escalation; Sobyanin tries to restore a sense of “normality.” Yet the Moscow mayor’s therapeutic statements, even when widely amplified by the propaganda machine, will not improve the party’s rating. In its campaigning United Russia trades on the image of Putin’s party or “team.” The Russian president’s own rhetoric is closer to Lavrov’s than to Sobyanin’s. The war-weary voter understands perfectly well that the decisive word will still belong to the president, who publicly wonders aloud “what is the country supposed to do” once the war is over.
