Putin Expected To Win Election With No Opposition
This weekend, Vladimir Putin is expected to win a six-year term as Russian president in a vote that the Kremlin claims will demonstrate public support for his invasion of Ukraine.
Since taking office as president or prime minister on December 31, 1999, Putin has suppressed all opposition and dissent, implementing a degree of domestic control that guarantees the outcome is certain.
He will be able to remain in the Kremlin for at least 2030 if he wins the competition scheduled for March 15–17, which will be the longest tenure of any Russian leader since Catherine the Great in the eighteenth century.
The former KGB agent is feeling very confident at the moment of the poll.
For the first time in months, Russian forces in Ukraine have made progress on the battlefield.
“He has no rivals at the moment and cannot have any,” Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov said last year.
“Nobody can realistically compete with him,” he said.
Navalny passed away last month in a prison colony in the Arctic.
Despite Putin's demonization in the West, the Kremlin claims the vote will demonstrate domestic Russian support for him and his campaign.
Critical Elections
The electoral process is taken seriously by the Kremlin, despite its ceremonial overtones.
Moscow has thrown money at a campaign aimed at igniting support for Putin.
To further bolster his image as a tough guy, the president has traveled the nation and been seen flying in the cockpit of a supersonic nuclear bomber.
“These elections are very important for the Kremlin,” Chatham House fellow Nikolai Petrov told AFP.
“It is needed to demonstrate that Russians overwhelmingly support Putin,” during the military offensive, he said.
The goal for the Kremlin is to get more support for Putin than he did in his four prior election victories.
According to official results, he received 77.5 percent of the vote in 2018.
That contest was clouded by widespread allegations of ballot stuffing, fraud, and forced voting, despite the fact that there was no actual competition.
Putin will formally compete against three other candidates this year who have been endorsed by the Kremlin in an effort to create the appearance of competition.
Tens of thousands of Russians supported anti-Putin politician Boris Nadezhdin's unexpected bid to run on a platform of peace, which resulted in his disqualification from the election.
Without A Doubt
Russia's “managed democracy” was once described by analysts as having a liberal candidate who was permitted to run by the Kremlin.
They now refer to it as “autocracy,” sometimes known as “totalitarianism.”
There will also be voting in the Crimean peninsula, which was taken in 2014, and the four areas of Ukraine that Moscow asserts it has annexed in 2022.
Petrov stated that Moscow is no longer concerned about trying to portray the vote to the West or even Russian society as a valid democratic exercise.
Less than a year after Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of a mercenary company, put an end to a mutiny, the Kremlin will want to demonstrate to potential opponents and heirs that Putin is safe in his position.
The opposition leaders in Russia who are still in prison or exile hope to sabotage the parade.
They hope to see long lines of anti-Putin Russians outside polling places on election day.
The dissident display might frighten Putin, according to Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of Navalny.
Unfazed, the Kremlin looks like.
Earlier this month, Peskov declared, “We will hold the kind of elections that our people need,” rejecting the claims of unfree and unfair voting.
“We won't tolerate any criticism of our democracy. Our democracy is the best.”
AFP
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