M. Stulov / Vedomosti

The results of Sunday's regional and municipal elections are still being counted, and their results will be assessed by analysts for a long time. So far, we are only talking about the quality and legitimacy of the procedure. Reports on the progress of election campaigns in the capital region and in the provinces, the number of violations and their specifics (see the article on page 01) do not allow us to talk about the general vector of development of political competition in Russia. At the same time, the promise of greater competition was unable to attract voters to the elections. In most regions, the voter turnout did not exceed 35%, which is 1.7 times lower than in the parliamentary elections of 2011, and 1.9 times lower than in the presidential elections of 2012.

Experts from the Civil Initiatives Committee claim that the relatively free admission of new players, including non-systemic ones, to the political market in a number of regions is combined with their expulsion in others. Now we can say that yesterday different phenomena took place in Russia. Somewhere, like in Moscow, Yekaterinburg and, for example, Buryatia, almost real elections were held, where new candidates competed with their programs and ideas. In others, a single voting day was held with pre-defined limits of acceptable results. It is significant, experts from the Civil Initiatives Committee write, that more than half of all refusals to register candidates were in four regions.

The regional elections demonstrated that the country does not have a single legal framework that would guarantee citizens political representation at different levels and branches of government. In most regions, the bureaucracy tried to hedge its bets by ensuring the dominance of one of the candidates on television and by appeasing (if not bribing) traditional voters. However, against the backdrop of the ongoing use of manipulative technologies in some provinces, more or less honest campaigns look like a triumph of democracy. The authorities of advanced regions complain about the excessive appetites of their rivals. The rivals demand real equality and equal rights.

Several political and bureaucratic currents are fighting in the country, each with its own idea of competition and its acceptable limits. In the absence of common rules, they are established manually in the course of bargaining between local ruling elites or clans and the Kremlin. The selective introduction of competition is increasingly unsatisfactory for all participants in the political market.

From the editor: Electoral elections