On March 18, a stoic Vladimir Putin presided over a stage-managed celebration in Red Square to mark his election to a fifth term as Russia’s president. There was no doubt about the general results, which were compiled after a three-day voting period over the weekend. Putin won with nearly 76.3 million votes, or 88.5% of the total—the highest percentage and largest absolute number of votes he has ever received. This is a significantly better result than most observers had predicted, with pre-election estimates settling around 80%. The only declared candidates who seriously opposed Putin were disqualified from participation over alleged irregularities in gathering the signatures necessary to be placed on the ballot. Russia’s principal domestic opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, who was not a candidate, died in suspicious circumstances last month in an Arctic prison, an event the government unconvincingly describes as an “unfortunate accident.” All other opposition leaders are either in prison or in foreign exile. Nevertheless, over 77% of eligible voters participated.
Extended in 2018 to six years rather than the original four originally set down in the post-Soviet constitution, Putin’s next term will see him continue in power until at least 2030. Along with his stints as prime minister in 1999-2000 and 2008-2012, his rule of Russia is the longest since that of Catherine the Great, which lasted from 1762 to 1796. In the not-inconceivable event that Putin is reelected in 2030, when he will be 77, which is former U.S. president and leading Republican 2024 presidential contender Donald J. Trump’s present age, his rule will exceed that of all Russian rulers since Peter the Great. Only in 2036 will Russia’s current constitutional provisions, which were amended in 2020 to limit future presidents to two terms, make Putin ineligible for reelection. By then, he will be 83, or only two years older than current U.S. President Joe Biden, but changing the constitution to suit his interests has never before been an obstacle. Putin’s mandate is closer to the 90% or more of votes routinely won by third-world dictators, a predictable roster of whom rushed to congratulate him. No Western country believes the election to have been democratically legitimate.
The celebrations were robust, with enthusiastic crowds cheering, popular musicians crooning ballads to Putin, and solemn protestations of patriotism and national pride resounding under the spires of the Kremlin. The three other candidates who were permitted to run—a communist, an ultranationalist, and a nominal centrist—none of whom received more than 4.4% of the vote—were all summoned to the stage to speak of their admiration for the victor and his achievements, exemplifying the concept of ‘controlled opposition.’ The date—March 18—has a new significance in Russia’s history. Ten years ago, it was the date on which a dubious referendum held in Crimea determined that the strategic peninsula should be transferred to Russia from Ukraine. “Ten years in the national harbor!” proclaimed neon stage lights blazing alongside the words “Crimea” and “Sevastopol,” the region’s major naval base.
As expected, the election unfolded in an atmosphere of strict control. Putin’s government dominates Russia’s media, with independent information sources limited to a very small number of outlets based either outside of the country or in the recesses of the internet. Television news, by far the most important element of Russia’s media, has been under near-total government control for more than twenty years. Since the renewed war against Ukraine began in February 2022, criticism of the government or the war—and indeed even calling it a ‘war’—has been a criminal offense punishable by up to fifteen years in prison. Putin-appointed bureaucrats control all levers of the national voting apparatus, including the courts and the electoral authorities themselves. Russia’s computerized ballot counting system is thought to be prone to easy manipulation by government agents to secure the desired results. Elements of the electorate under immediate government supervision—military personnel, government employees, and workers in state-controlled enterprises—are believed to have been compelled to vote for Putin. Hundreds of thousands of regime opponents have emigrated from Russia in the past two years; many have no plans to return and compelling reasons to remain abroad.
Limited protests involved a handful of incidents in which opposition demonstrators attempted to disrupt polling by setting off smoke bombs or splattering ballots with green ink. Government spokesmen dismissed these annoyances as “mosquito bites” and used them to prop up their argument that Russia is vulnerable to Western provocations. In some places, a sudden surge of anti-government voters arriving at noon on the final day of balloting was conceived as a legally permissible sign of public protest and reportedly approved by Navalny just days before his death. But when Putin was asked about it, he cynically pretended to welcome the voters’ enthusiasm in the name of democracy.
One would have to go back to Soviet times to find a more authoritarian polity in Russia, but the irony is that Putin’s strongarm tactics are unnecessary. Independent opinion polling is still permitted in Russia, likely because of the pro-regime results it shows, and has consistently registered high levels of popularity for the Russian president. The Moscow-based Levada Center recently found that some 86% of Russians approve of Putin, even if large segments of his professed supporters also say they favor deescalated tensions with the West, a peace settlement with Ukraine, and other policies adverse to current realities.
Putin’s popularity may be the natural product of a nation at war. Many Russians agree with their government’s anti-Western posturing even without media manipulation, and massive military spending is keeping the national economy buoyant despite extensive foreign sanctions. The regime clearly wants to take no chances, however. Putin spoke of the election as an opportunity to achieve “internal consolidation” in order to allow Russia to “act effectively on the front line,” an essential goal if he is to be taken seriously, even with near-total control of the state and society. Many specialists expect that he will use his new mandate to reinforce his own position after recent war-related challenges and to advance a new generation of loyal young nationalists into positions of power at the expense of an entrenched elite whose attitudes were forged in Soviet times. Most of the rest of Putin’s pronouncements around the election have focused on securing national honor, a concept that he appears to have scaled back from destroying Ukraine as a meaningfully independent nation-state to merely ensuring Russia’s long-term possession of Crimea and the eastern provinces.
Whether Putin will succeed in his next six-year term remains to be seen. Russia’s battlefield performance has been poor, and future military advantage may well depend on using its sheer numerical superiority to overcome Ukraine’s limited forces. As astute observers have maintained since the beginning of the conflict, its likeliest outcome is a negotiated settlement nobody really likes. Putin’s most immediate interest is to get one that allows him some pretense to victory via territorial acquisition and, perhaps, some form of security guarantee that will keep Ukraine out of the West and vice versa. His larger legacy, however, will be one of repression and fear, intimidation, and brutality. And, like more than one Russian authoritarian ruler before him, his ‘managed democracy’ paradigm leaves no clear room for a successor. With essentially no competition from other candidates and no alternative to one-man rule on the horizon, the election has asked the question of whither Russia without Putin?
