This is how Russia ‘votes’

Recapping the latest round of managed democracy

Russia held elections in more than 20 regions last Sunday, September 13. Once again, this important democratic hurdle turned out to be a mere formality: none of the Kremlin's candidates lost their gubernatorial races; the Communists and other mainstream political parties played their role as extras in this drama; the anti-Kremlin opposition, for the most part, didn't even participate in the elections; and Alexey Navalny's so-called "Democratic Coalition" lost its one race in Kostroma. Meduza recaps what you need to know about Russia's elections this past weekend.

The only second round. Since gubernatorial elections were reinstated in Russia in 2012, the intrigue of these contests has not been who would win, but whether any challenger would succeed in forcing a runoff. Until yesterday, none of the gubernatorial races—not in 2012, 2013, or 2014—ever went to a second round. This year, however, one of United Russia's candidates couldn't pull off a victory in the first round of voting, and now Sergey Eroshchenko, who won 49.6 percent of the electorate in Irkutsk, will face off against the Communists' man, Sergey Levchenko, who pulled in 36.61 percent of the vote. In Russia, where Mari El Governor Leonid Markelov was able to win reelection despite recently "joking" that he would destroy a town's only road because it didn't welcome him warmly enough, Eroshchenko's failure to win in the first round is particularly glaring.

Abnormal results. While some regions in Russia offer the semblance of political competition (allowing the Communists to garner 20-30 percent of the vote), there are places that don't even bother with appearances. In Kemerovo, for instance, Aman Tuleev is said to have won 96.69 percent of the vote, with 92 percent voter turnout. Tuleev is 71 years old and has been running Kemerovo for the past twenty years, and no laws on term limits prevented this man from winning another five years as the region's head. In another five regions (Tatarstan, Penza, Leningrad, and Bryansk), the winners pulled in more than 80 percent of the vote.

By today's standards, some of United Russia's isolated defeats in local races might be considered "abnormal," too. Russia's ruling party will have to cope without a majority in Verkhny Ufaley's city council, and its mayoral candidate in Karabash didn't make the grade.

Democrats defeated. The "Democratic Coalition," which formed around opposition-leader Alexey Navalny, didn't field any gubernatorial candidates, but it did try to participate in several regional parliamentary contests. The Coalition was only allowed to register in Kostroma, however, and its candidates there failed to win more than five percent of the vote, leaving it with zero seats in the local parliament. Navalny and his team have already admitted defeat. The election seems to prove the opposition's worst fears: anti-Kremlin democrats are somewhat known in the cities, but go out into the regions and their support drops nearly to zero.

There were irregularities, but the scale of violations is unclear. Russian election officials have declared this weekend's voting to be clean, and the Kremlin-friendly media focused merely on a few "funny" violations, like how a man tried to vote dressed as Darth Vader, and how an animal trainer wanted to register a ballot in his bear's name. The independent election-monitoring group Golos recorded hundreds of minor irregularities, but the different numbers of observers in various locations makes it hard to develop an overall picture of what happened. The highest concentration of election monitors was in Kostroma, where the Democratic Coalition was fighting for seats in the parliament, and it was in Kostroma that the greatest number of election violations was recorded.