Before each election, Russian electoral legislation undergoes adjustments: the authorities strengthen control and try to protect themselves from potential electoral challenges, experts note. As a result, it becomes a sort of compendium of opportunistic cheating.
The most striking feature of the latest amendments before the regional elections in September has been the expansion of the unconstitutional practice of depriving citizens of their voting rights. Now, all it takes is an arbitrary decision by the Ministry of Justice to label a candidate as a ‘foreign agent’ at any stage of the campaign. The status of ‘foreign agent’ has become a universal way of extrajudicially restricting the political and civil rights of any opponents of the regime.
Despite total control and repression, regional elections remain a source of threats to the Kremlin. On the eve of the upcoming elections, the Kremlin has compiled a ‘red’ list of regions where such a threat exists. This list includes, notably, St Petersburg, Khabarovsk Krai, the Republic of Altai and Khakassia.
The main source of these threats remains the Kremlin's unitary-colonial approach to relations with regional elites – a kind of ‘autocratic complex’ of Putin's personalism. Ultimately, this leads to local and social dissatisfaction resonating with the anti-Moscow sentiments of the elites, creating the potential for protest mobilisation. While this potential is currently insufficient to trigger serious political conflicts, it could become a significant problem if the federal centre's resources are significantly reduced.
Another pressing task for the Kremlin is to prevent grassroots activists from participating in municipal elections, which became a channel for legitimising opposition politicians in the electoral field in the late 2010s.
One of the most notable features of the upcoming regional elections in Russia, which will take place on 8 September – just after the holiday season – will be the further expansion of arbitrary restrictions on citizens' passive electoral rights. Such restrictions have been in place since 2022, when those convicted of ‘extremism’ were banned from voting for five years after their convictions were expunged (despite the fact that this restriction directly contradicts Article 32 of the Constitution). However, while such restrictions previously relied on a court verdict, now people included on the list of ‘foreign agents’ and ‘persons involved in extremist and terrorist activities’ are deprived of passive voting rights. They are not only prohibited from running for office but also from being authorised representatives of candidates and observers, meaning they are deprived of a portion of not only electoral but also general civil rights. The new regulations turn the Ministry of Justice, which compiles the list of ‘foreign agents’ extrajudicially and solely at its discretion, into an active participant in the electoral process, capable of disqualifying candidates at almost any stage.
In general, as noted in a report by the voter rights protection movement ‘Golos’ (which is itself recognised as a “foreign agent”), disregarding the principle of legislative stability, Russian authorities conduct a round of ‘fine-tuning’ before almost every election according to their perception of potential electoral threats. This year's legislative novelties, apart from the ‘foreign agents’ legislation, allow elections to be held under martial law (at the discretion of the head of a constituent entity of the federation), permit additional remuneration to be paid to electoral commissions from local budgets (effectively bribing them to correct vote counting), to complicate accreditation of media representatives to work on voting days, and to cap the electoral fund before a candidate is registered (making the already complicated procedure of collecting signatures for self-nominated candidates even harder), as detailed in the ‘Golos’ report.
Russian electoral legislation is increasingly turning into a compendium of electoral cheating, with rules being supplemented almost annually depending on the situation. This itself reflects the instability of Russian authoritarian stability and the weakness of party control structures. Despite the absence of an organised opposition in the country, the authorities still have to deal with numerous initiatives from elite groups and grassroots activism in regional elections. This reflects the insufficient entrenchment of authoritarian and paternalistic political culture, on the one hand, and the constant tension that exists in the relations between the centre and regional elites, on the other.
In the late 2010s, despite blocking open opposition access to electoral competition, regional elections became a weak link in Putin's consolidating autocracy, demonstrating the potential for protest and tactical voting (→ Liberal Mission Foundation: Stress Test on Half of Russia; Counter Mobilisation). But even now, in a much more repressive environment, a number of outbursts of protest at the regional level (in Bashkortostan in winter 2024, and in Dagestan in the autumn of 2023) point to the federal centre's weak control over local agendas.
Meanwhile, on the so-called unified voting day on 8 September, elections will be held for governors in nearly a quarter of Russian regions (21 regions), 13 regional parliaments, numerous local government bodies (city councils and dumas), and direct mayoral elections in Abakan and Anadyr. In late June, ahead of the electoral campaigns, the presidential administration divided the electoral regions into three categories during a closed seminar for vice-governors: ‘red’, causing concern for the Kremlin, ‘yellow’, with a lower level of threats, and ‘green’, where the Kremlin believes it has the electoral processes under control.
The first category includes St Petersburg (gubernatorial elections), Khabarovsk Krai (gubernatorial elections, elections to the Khabarovsk City Assembly and City Duma), Altai Republic (gubernatorial elections), Khakassia (Duma by-elections, Abakan mayoral elections), Mari El (elections for the legislative assembly and Yoshkar-Ola City Duma), and Kurgan Oblast (Kurgan City Duma elections). This means that the demonstration of Moscow's full control over the campaign and its results in these regions is seen as an important indicator of the stability of the political system.
However, the problematic nature of these regions is not defined by the presence of political confrontations (particularly related to attitudes towards the war), which are suppressed by repression. In St Petersburg, the tension is determined by the fact that the Kremlin is pushing an unpopular and weak governor for a second term in the context of a rather pluralistic political culture of the metropolis and significant diversity of regional elite groups. Bashkortostan, in contrast, has been an example of a regional authoritarian regime with a paternalistic political culture in past decades. However, the struggle that the federal centre has waged as part of its centralization policy and suppression of local and national identities against the powerful regional clientele entrenched here in the 1990s-2000s has led to the formation of significant protest potential in the republic. This potential has manifested in several highly visible and massive protest episodes in recent years: in 2017, protests were held to defend the study of the Bashkir language in schools, in 2020, an ecological battle erupted around Mount Kushtau, and finally, in the winter of 2024 – despite the repressive wartime atmosphere – protests in support of Fail Alsynov, one of the leaders of the movement to protect Kushtau.
In the Republic of Khakassia and Khabarovsk Territory, a tradition of resistance to Moscow's dictates has developed. In Khakassia, the federal centre twice (in 2018 and 2023) conceded to the outsider governor from the Communist Party, Valentin Konovalov. The Khabarovsk Territory has gained the image of a ‘Russian Vendée’ thanks to the protest vote for Sergey Furgal in 2018 and the massive and prolonged protests following his arrest in 2020. The Kremlin's appointee in the region, Mikhail Degtyarev, has failed to establish himself and build relationships with the local elites, and the movement to defend Furgal was declared ‘extremist’ in February 2024, six months before the elections, indicating its remaining organisational and political potential.
In the Altai Republic, the Kremlin must ensure the election of Andrei Turchak, a major United Russia functionary suddenly ‘thrown’ into the region (→ Re: Russia: Loyalty Rules and Change of Favourites). This act of state voluntarism has activated anti-Moscow sentiments in the region, intensified by rumours of a possible merger of the republic with the Altai Territory and the expansion of capital from the capital, viewing the republic as a potential recreational cluster that could replace European mountain resorts for the elite and middle class. A manifestation of these sentiments was the widespread outrage caused by a viral video of a quarrel between Sberbank head German Gref and taxi drivers at Gorno-Altaysk airport (in April, Sberbank became the owner of the airport). The Kremlin's task in the Altai Republic at this stage is to suppress the potential for protest voting, which currently appears quite real.
As can be seen from these examples, electoral tensions mainly stem from the Kremlin's unitary-colonial approach to relations with regional elites, a sort of ‘autocratic complex’ of Putin's personalism, which does not pay sufficient attention to mechanisms for integrating these elites into a single power pyramid and relies on forceful methods in its dealings with them. This eventually leads to local and social discontent agendas resonating with anti-Moscow sentiments among the elites, creating the potential for protest mobilisation. Currently, this potential is insufficient for serious political conflicts, but such conflicts are quite likely if the federal centre's resources are significantly reduced for some reason.
A second area of concern for the Kremlin in connection with the upcoming ‘unified day of voting’ is the municipal elections in Russian metropolises. In the late 2010s, these became a channel for the political legitimation of grassroots activism, imbued with the most oppositional sentiments. Therefore, opposing the registration of candidates for municipal deputies in Moscow and St Petersburg has become a distinctive feature of the current campaign. However, in Moscow, the introduction of total electronic voting (voting by paper ballot will only be possible upon request), which opens up unlimited possibilities for the falsification of voting results, was the reason why it was not even included in the list of ‘red’ regions by the presidential administration, instead being given only with ‘yellow’ status.