55%left: what is happening with Putin's rating

The share of Russians who are ready to vote for Vladimir Putin in the presidential election decreased to 55% - this is an anti -record. The moods of Russians are also affected by elections in Ukraine, where an “alternative candidate” wins, whose analogues are not in Russia

The figure of the week is the new electoral rating of Vladimir Putin: if the elections were held today, only 55% of Russians who were ready to participate in the elections would vote for him, showed the Levada Center survey. The number of people wishing to vote for Putin falls along with his rating of approval, which slowed down, but did not stop the fall after the collapse due to the pension reform.

• Completely with the data of the “Levada Center” can be found here . Putin, as a preferred presidential candidate, called 41% of the total number of respondents and 55% among those who said that he would be ready to vote right at the time of the survey. This is the worst result in the entire history of polls according to the following method: the first was conducted in April 2014 and showed the figure 60% of the number of ready to vote.
• The result looks natural if you compare it with the trust of Putin as a policy that measures the state All -Russian Central Executive Committee. Two important facts are visible from the graph below. Firstly, after a shock fall due to raising the retirement age, Putin’s rating not only did not begin to recover, but also continued the slow, but fall. And secondly, pension reform only accelerated the trend, which is visible on the schedule until the summer of 2018: after the peaks of 2014-2015 and the confidence rating, Putin, and the number of ready to vote gradually decreases without sharp social upheavals. From the general line, only spring election mobilization of 2018 is knocked out.

• The sociologist of the Levada Center, Alexei Levinson, explains the fall in the number of Putin’s voters by not expressed growth of protest moods, but “the general cooling of the attitude of the townsfolk to power and the first person” and the disappointment in the Russian political system.
• “Situational” Putin’s electoral rating is influenced by elections in Ukraine, in which the “alternative candidate” Vladimir Zelensky wins , political scientist Konstantin Kalachev told Kommersant. In conditions when the number of people wishing to vote for Putin is falling, but the level of support of other candidates is not growing, such an “alternative candidate” would probably be in demand in Russia.

What to expect next?

Political scientist Kalachev calls these numbers “very alarming for the authorities: if you finally drop the ratings, problems may arise with the transit of power in 2024”. In a recent report on the results of the first year of the new term of Vladimir Putin, experts of the Liberal Mission Foundation called a sharp deterioration in social moods, which caused a fall in the ratings, the main danger to the authorities. But during the reign of Vladimir Putin, the regime has already successfully overcome similar crises several times, they noted. They called the possible solutions to the problem of ratings "either a negative agenda with the escalation of foreign policy conflicts, or positive with the unifying process with Belarus." However, against the last idea, the permanent Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko clearly protests .