Elections: last count

Less than a week before the elections of the Moscow mayor, leading sociological services in Russia published their forecasts. You can blame the bias of Russian sociology as much as you like, but it is important to remember that their preliminary results always do not differ too significantly from the final indicators. This is exactly what happened, for example, before the odious Duma elections of 2011. (How such amazing accuracy is achieved is another question.) In short, today we can assume that Sergei Sobyanin’s victory in the first round of the Moscow mayoral election is a settled matter. VTsIOM predicts that the acting mayor will get 62 percent, Levada Center - 59. In other words, we can state that the intrigue with the second round has been exhausted - it will not happen.
But what cannot yet be predicted is the reaction of protest Moscow to such a disastrous result for its candidate. Today, in the wake of a truly impressive election campaign led by opposition candidate Alexei Navalny, there is a feeling that the tens of thousands of people who make up the driving force of this campaign are unlikely to meekly accept the result that the Moscow City Election Commission will eventually announce. Moreover, even now, according to polls, the majority of Muscovites do not believe that the elections in the capital will be fair and transparent. It is unlikely that the number of these people will change dramatically in the remaining days. That is, the prospect of a huge number of Navalny’s supporters taking to the streets remains more than realistic. Here it is also important to understand what position Navalny himself will take, is there a scenario in which he will be ready to agree with the results of the vote on September 8? But no one will answer this question for you today. Let’s just remember that an election campaign with a noose around your neck is not a completely banal event and does not at all fit into our ideas about a civilized electoral process.