MOSCOW — It’s election season in Russia, and the two biggest obstacles for President Vladimir Putin as he seeks to extend his long rule for another six years aren’t on the ballot.
Rising apathy among voters and a boycott urged by one of Mr. Putin’s last prominent critics threaten to put a serious damper on the president’s bid to win a fresh mandate and cement his legacy.
Although there is hardly any doubt that Mr. Putin will triumph in the March 18 presidential elections, the Kremlin is desperately trying to gin up turnout to boost the increasingly autocratic Mr. Putin’s claim that he commands the support of the vast majority of Russians.
After almost two decades in power, the onetime KGB agent enjoys total command over state media. The Kremlin controls the all-important election committee, which counts the votes and decides who qualifies for the ballot.
Indeed, Mr. Putin is so certain of victory that he has barely campaigned or bothered to publish an election program. But the very lack of excitement about the election result has resulted in widespread indifference.
“Why should I bother voting? Everything has been decided in advance. My vote won’t change anything,” Daria Orlova, a 22-year-old university student, told The Washington Times.
The ballot lists other candidates, including Pavel Grudinin, the Communist Party nominee; perennial fringe candidate Vladimir Zhirinovsky, an ultranationalist; and Ksenia Sobchak, a liberal journalist and former model whose father was close to Mr. Putin. None of them is expected to receive more than 10 percent of the vote.
“If less than 50 percent of voters come out to cast ballots in the upcoming ’Vladimir Putin election,’ this will be construed as a sharp decline in legitimacy of the ’national leader,’” journalist Vadim Shtepa wrote recently in the Jamestown Foundation’s Eurasia Daily Monitor.
Ironically, a candidate who was blocked from running is proving the biggest thorn in the front-runner’s side. Alexei Navalny, a charismatic Kremlin critic, has called for a boycott of the vote to protest what he says are rigged elections.
Mr. Navalny, a 41-year-old anti-corruption lawyer with a massive social media following, was barred by officials from the elections over a fraud conviction that he says was trumped up to stop him from challenging Mr. Putin. He spent much of last year on the campaign trail and organizing street protests in an ultimately unsuccessful bid to force his way onto the ballot.
“What they are offering us can’t be called elections,” Mr. Navalny said in a recent online address to his supporters. “Only Putin and the candidates he has personally selected — those who don’t represent even the smallest threat to him — are taking part. To go to the polling station now is to vote for lies and corruption.”
All of that poses a problem for government officials, who have reportedly been ordered by the Kremlin to ensure Mr. Putin wins the election with at least 70 percent of the vote with a 70 percent turnout.
That could be a tall order.
Polls apart
An opinion poll released in November by the independent Moscow-based Levada Center indicated that just 28 percent of Russians definitely intend to cast ballots and another 30 percent said they would probably do so. About 60 percent of Russians who are likely to vote plan to back Mr. Putin. Some analysts estimate that the overall turnout could be as low as 45 percent.
In contrast, VTsIOM, the state-backed pollster, said over 80 percent of Russians were likely to cast ballots and more than two-thirds of them plan to vote for Mr. Putin.
Opposition figures are skeptical about VTsIOM’s objectivity, however. Last year, the pollster’s head, Valery Fyodorov, described Russians who criticize Mr. Putin as “scum.”
“The Kremlin is planning to base the legitimacy of Putin’s new six-year term on a high turnout,” said Leonid Volkov, Mr. Navalny’s chief of staff. “The reality is that due to a crackdown on the political field, no one finds the elections interesting. Of course, we don’t believe the VTsIOM poll.”
Officials have even resorted to marketing tricks to boost interest in the campaign and rustle up more votes for the president.
One of the most original of the Kremlin’s initiatives is a “Photo at the Polls” competition, which will hand out iPhones and iPads to those submitting the best ballot-box selfies. The unusual move is part of a plan by the presidential administration to create a holiday atmosphere on voting day, Russia’s RBC media outlet reported, citing a leaked Kremlin document. Famous sports figures, comedians, actors and bloggers will help promote the competition.
Russia’s regions are also planning to hold popular referendums — on carefully selected nonpolitical questions — on the same day as the presidential vote, again with the idea of enticing more Russians to make the trek to the polls.
Other polling station attractions are likely to include family games such as guess-the-word, soccer skills tests, and nonbinding referendums on issues of interest to schoolchildren and their parents. Government employees are reported to be facing pressure to vote.
Critics say the schemes to attract voters echo the tactics used by Soviet authorities to ensure high turnout at single-party elections, when usually scarce supplies of meat and vegetables were put on sale at polling stations. The elections are also being advertised on billboards and milk cartons.
Outrage over vote-rigging at parliamentary elections sparked massive protests in Moscow in 2011 that continued until Mr. Putin’s inauguration in May 2012. The authorities, wary of a repeat of that experience, have made it much harder for independent vote monitors to gain access to polling stations.
“It’s going to be tougher to monitor the vote this time, but we’ll give it our best,” Mr. Volkov said.
Two of Mr. Navalny’s supporters were handed brief jail sentences last week on charges of urging people to attend unsanctioned opposition rallies in support of a vote boycott. Ruslan Shaveddinov and Kira Yarmysh had traveled abroad to release a live online broadcast of nationwide protests on Jan. 28 and were detained by police when they returned to Moscow.
On Monday, Mr. Navalny’s problems mounted when he was summoned for questioning over reports that he hit a police officer during the Jan. 28 protest in Moscow.
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