“The NWO is yours, the problems are ours”

Phenomenology of regional elections in Russia

Despite attempts to establish total control, regional elections in Russia remain a field of specific competition, in which federal party brands play the role of franchises and screens for the bizarre struggle of local clienteles, elite groups and projects of local activism. This political culture prefers sabotage to protest, and its loyalty to power is conditional and pragmatic. Therefore, time after time, the Kremlin fails to build a real “vertical” in regional politics. One of the most important results of the current campaign was a sharp loss of electoral weight by the Communists - this is caused by the too obvious support of the so-called special military operation by the leadership of the Communist Party and its desire to get rid of disloyal and independent activists who brought additional votes to the party in previous elections, says the largest Russian expert on regional politics Alexander Kynev.

The logic of regional elections: clienteles, franchises and conditional loyalty

Many expectations of the public and experts regarding political processes in Russia, including this year’s regional elections, are not being realized or justified due to misconceptions about Russian society itself and underestimation of its real heterogeneity. This is where incorrect expectations of the appearance/disappearance/absence of resistance come from. Both the totality of the regime and the level of loyalty of citizens to it, the heterogeneity of local elites and the very features of protest in Russian political culture are not understood and overestimated.

The basis of power and its electoral successes is not the personal ratings of officials (although, of course, a popular official always adds votes) or the stable support of citizens for some ideology (it is unlikely that you will be able to find anyone in United Russia who will explain to you what is its ideology), but good old conformism and corporate mobilization. The government is supported because it is the power and one way or another pays money (salary to an official, public sector employee, military personnel, pension to a pensioner), or by order of specific bosses, if a certain enterprise (organization) is directly interested in the outcome of the elections.

That is why United Russia, the “party in power,” is not a rigid ideological structure, but a loose conglomerate of supporters of various structures and clienteles. And its electoral lists are headed by big bosses - the president, governors, mayors - as a symbol of power and its administrative vertical. The abundant representation in these lists of heads of educational institutions, health care, the social sphere, and large industrial enterprises is an example of “corporate representation” and a mechanism for corporate ensuring voting results - creating conditions for coercion of voters. This basis in the form of dependent categories of voters has not gone away. The number of these groups is limited, but they are well mobilized, and the lower the turnout, the greater their role.

The electoral failures of such a “party in power” occur for two reasons: 1) a decrease in the level of conformity, when these basic groups simply cease to receive sufficient payment for loyalty (examples - the pension reform of 2018 or monetization in 2004-2005), or 2) loss officials of their symbolic status when their very power and authority are questioned. Such a failure occurred in 2011, when the last previously popularly elected governors were dismissed, and before the 2021 elections - against the backdrop of a sharp acceleration in the rotation of governors in 2017–2021 and their increasing “depersonalization” in the eyes of the electorate.

This is a system of loyalty of the population to the authorities, but not the support of the authorities on the population. As soon as the feeling arises that “the king is not real” and “there is no money,” everything collapses. All allies of “power” are temporary and situational. This is a huge all-Russian swamp of “the best people in the city.” And with a change of “tsar” and a competent switching of channels of patronage and “payment for loyalty”, quite quickly the entire conglomerate of supporters of the former tsar turns into a conglomerate of supporters of the new tsar. It is not surprising that the support regions of the CPSU/CPRF of the early 1990s (national regions, the conservative south, the agricultural periphery) quickly became the support regions of Putin and United Russia.

The protest Russia of cities, which in reality is larger in number, can intervene in this process, but is usually demoralized, fragmented (for cities are a zone of individualism and mutual criticism), has no recognized leaders and simply does not go to elections.

Conformity and looseness of the vertical in the conditions of a huge country lead to the fact that there is no totality of control and management and there cannot be. No one is able to quickly monitor such a huge number of territories with tens of thousands of candidates, and even more so no one is able to manage their management. Even within one large region, administrations often do not understand what is happening in remote areas and cannot do anything about it. The system is able to fight only the already familiar evil, but is not able to monitor the new and as yet unidentified.

Political parties are the same conditionally controlled opposition as the electorate is conditionally loyal. There is neither love nor loyalty in their relationship with the authorities. These, of course, are not puppets - they are intimidated, ready to negotiate and coordinate everything, but at the same time completely independent and selfish substances. As soon as power weakens, their controllability disappears. They control their assets even worse than their power. If the active party of the ruling party is dependent on it organizationally and financially, then opposition candidates often, on the contrary, pay it for the right to be nominated. Sometimes the party itself persuades an asset to run because the asset is in short supply. In regional and local elections, the campaign of any opposition party is a franchise, where a regional or local elite group or individual politician runs for elections under the federal brand.

As a result, we get a very heterogeneous environment that fits into the framework imposed from above. Conformists portray the party in power, all others diverge among the parties allowed to participate in the elections, depending on their personal circumstances. A part of society (most often “idealistic nihilists” who do not trust any parties) participates in all this as “free” electrons - “independent candidates”.

The Mummy Comes to Life: Metamorphoses of Regional Competition

The 2022 election campaign, extreme due to the SVO, was initially a shock to its potential participants. It is not clear what is happening, personal and business prospects are not clear, there is no funding, but there are new bans, the widespread closure of independent media - the main platforms for campaigning, the impossibility of public campaign events. Nomination, submission of documents for registration, registration took place in a state of almost suspended animation. The parties carried out campaigning only within their networks, and those who were not involved in them hardly saw it. The authorities removed a “familiar evil” from the elections - they smashed the organization of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation in Vladivostok, which was too successful for the Communist Party of the Russian Federation in 2021 (“the case of Artem Samsonov” and the expulsion of his supporters from the Communist Party of the Russian Federation), initiated cases depriving the right to run for office for the use of extremist symbols and “fakes about the armed forces “against Moscow municipal deputies whom she already knew personally. She registered the rest, and began to remove too noticeable new candidates from the elections through the courts only towards the end of August.

However, completely unnoticeable in June-July, the campaign began to come to life in August. A landslide tightening of the regime did not happen, the elections are getting closer, the media moved and began to appear on new platforms. People started speaking publicly again more often. And it turned out that removing “familiar evil” does not mean losing opponents. Russia again turns out to be too big and different: as soon as competition is removed from one side, it creeps out from the other, especially when people’s living conditions worsen.

The new governor squeezed people out of United Russia in North Ossetia: they immediately appear on opposition lists (A Just Russia, Party of Deeds). The former sponsors left A Just Russia in Kirov and ended up in the LDPR. Former Yabloko members and ex-independents in certain areas of Moscow find themselves in the “New People”. The unpopular governor Limarenko, instead of the popular mayor Nadsadin, is at the head of the United Russia list in Sakhalin - and now some city deputies have ended up in the same “New People”. Another unpopular governor provokes a protest campaign in Udmurtia. In Vladivostok, not all candidates in the elections turn out to be controllable simply because the Communist Party of the Russian Federation cannot live without an activist at all. In Moscow, instead of various liberal groups of the 2017 municipal elections (Katz and Gudkov’s team, Yabloko, Yashin’s team, Galyamina’s team, etc.), new groups are appearing - or independent patriots (“Society. The Future” by Yuneman - Makhnitsky), or completely modern leftists (“Advancement” of Lobanov - Zamyatin), separately there is “Yakubovich’s team”, etc.

Candidates seemingly from the authorities (in fact, from the local society and local elites) and seemingly loyal to the authorities are campaigning, carefully not mentioning the North Caucasus and not going beyond the local agenda and local problems. “The NWO is yours, but the problems are ours.” Society lives and continues to survive, diligently portraying loyalty to the “center” to the imposed rules and symbolic party framework, but nothing more.

Of course, this opportunism is not enough to change the situation in the country and change federal power. But it demonstrates that we are not in the cemetery: life goes on, as does resistance to pressure from above. There are simply two parallel agendas: the government itself and its federal media, on the one hand, and the rest of the country, on the other. People are pragmatic: adapting to the whims of the boss and engaging in sabotage is safer than openly fighting. But once the pressure eases, things can change unexpectedly and quickly. And it turns out that no one needs the SVO, and neither does United Russia. It was just the way the game was.

Communist Party of the Russian Federation and Northern Military District: the fiasco of revanchism

Whom this campaign punished were the sincere supporters of the SVO, which was the implementation of long-standing calls of the old conservative leadership of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation. It was with the approval by the Duma of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation project on recognition of the LPR/DPR that the SVO began. But the events in Ukraine became a severe crisis for the Communist Party of the Russian Federation. Over the past years, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation has represented a broad coalition from Stalinists and religious fanatics to local civil activists, including even libertarians and former supporters of Alexei Navalny. An alliance with the Communist Party of the Russian Federation gave them a chance of registration, and its status as the second highest-rated party increased their chances of election. It was the non-left tactical allies of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation that provided it with a significant share of the increase in votes in recent years. This situation was both beneficial to the party (it provided additional votes) and dangerous (it irritated the authorities), but it corresponded to the interests of various groups within the party that competed with each other.

However, in the conditions of the Northern Military District, external and internal pressure on the party increased sharply: the dissonance between the conservative federal leadership of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation and the more oppositional young grassroots activists, who often oppose the military adventure, became clearly visible. Purges began: expulsions from the party for “incorrect position on the Northern Military District”, transfers to impassable positions (Vladivostok, Moscow, etc.). As a result of distancing itself from the wing of its members most opposed to the authorities, from supporters and situational allies, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation was supposed to lose many votes. This is what happened. And its second place by a large margin over all other parties in September 2021 eventually disappeared. The Communist Party of the Russian Federation fell below local businessmen from the LDPR in the elections in Kursk and Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, below the LDPR and A Just Russia in Kirov (where it was almost caught up by the New People, who waged a completely herbivorous “positive” campaign). According to the first data, in North Ossetia the Communist Party of the Russian Federation did not even gain 5%, and in the end it was pulled to 12% only with the obvious purpose of justifying the taking away of votes from the main local opposition on the A Just Russia list. Where the Communist Party of the Russian Federation remains the second party, there is also a sharp drop compared to September 2021 and a very small gap from the rest.

Where did the votes of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation go? SVO supporters went to the “power”. When a state pursues a policy of revenge, supporters of revenge will inevitably be in the party in power (there are no two parties of revenge). Opposition voters disillusioned with the Communist Party of the Russian Federation scattered among other opposition parties - the positive “New People”, the Party of Pensioners (with low turnout, the role of pensioners is significantly higher), “A Just Russia” (its campaigns are general social, not all voters know about Prilepin) and even the LDPR ( without Zhirinovsky, it’s now just a franchise that can be filled with any content for local money). Left or right ideology has nothing to do with it - in the regions, voters look at personalities, general anti-ratings and reputation. Those who played ideology got paid for it in the end.

Russia is alive. The patient is alive, he is resisting. It's just that every country is different. Those who wanted reforms like in China in 1990 were told that this was impossible because Russians were not Chinese. Now, apparently, is the time to explain to those who want “protests like in France” (Georgia, Armenia, Ukraine, etc.) that this will not happen. Because this is Russia, huge, diverse, poorly mutually coordinated and therefore clumsy, conformist, always preferring sabotage to open protest. And the majority remained and will remain and will resist as best they can in their parallel life to the state.