Putin, Navalny And Russia's Bogus Election Campaign

-Analysis-

Next month’s presidential election in Russia is fast approaching, but Vladimir Putin is a busy man.

Putin has been busy ever since Boris Yeltsin first named him acting president on Dec., 1999, and has never looked back — two-and-half decades of leadership have been a quest for what he euphemistically has called “stability.”

The election, which will take place over three days beginning March 15, will no doubt ensure said stability. Things are indeed so stable in Russia’s would-be democracy that Putin didn’t need to show up to debate his opponents on Monday.

Why waste time or words when your policy is so clear? Kremlin spokesman Dmitriy Peskov has explained that Putin is no ordinary candidate given his “very busy schedule,” confirming that the incumbent would not be joining the presidential debates since “Russians can see Putin’s declarations on all aspects of life on a daily basis.”

For the record, there’s been no declaration at all from the Kremlin boss since the Feb. 16 sudden death in a northern Russian prison of Alexei Navalny, who had been the nation's most popular opposition figure for the past decade until Putin's regime sent him to the Gulag to die.

Back in December 2017, the country’s Central Election Commission (CEC) had barred Navalny from running for president. We can draw a straight line from that decision to Navalny’s chilling death — and back to Monday night’s farce of a debate.

Absolute deference

Beyond Navalny, all other potential bonafide opponents of Putin have been banned from running. In December, former television journalist and anti-war candidate Yekaterina Duntsova was disqualified after the CEC found “numerous violations” in her candidacy paperwork.

Boris Nadezhdin, another anti-war candidate backed by both Navalny and exiled former oligarch Mikhail Khodorovsky (in part known for his tense relations with Putin), was barred earlier this month because the CEC found that 9,000 of the 105,000 civilian signatures he submitted to qualify for the presidential race were invalid.

Nobody had anything critical to say.

So what was left for the nationally televised Putin-less debate? If you tuned in to Russia’s state-owned “Rossiya 1,” you would have seen two candidates and a stand-in for the third, all of whom were there to show absolute deference to the absent leader.

Independent Russian-language news site Agenstvo reported that of the three questions the television presenter asked candidates, two concerned President Vladimir Putin’s current projects.

The first was about the national project "Education," which is part of Putin’s "May Decrees" of 2018 (the de facto program of his fourth presidential term).

"How do you assess the progress of the implementation of the national project 'Education in Russia?' How realistic are his goals, and what adjustments are needed here?" the presenter asked the candidates.

As reported by Agenstvo, candidates Nikolai Kharitonov, from the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, and Vladislav Davankov from Russia’s “New People” caucus and deputy chair of the Russian Duma, both managed to avoid the question — and any critique of government policy. Nikita Berezin, a State Duma deputy, who was representing candidate Leonid Slutsky from the Kremlin-loyal ultra-nationalist Liberal Democratic Party, had nothing to add.

The second question pertained to “Russia’s rejection of the ‘Bologna’ system of higher education. The idea of rejecting the European system was first announced in 2022, but in February 2023 Putin proposed adopting the decision in a message to Russia’s Federal Assembly.”

Nobody had anything critical to say about this (often criticized) policy choice — or any other government policies during the debate. And the war in Ukraine? Navalny’s death? Those are questions that don’t even get asked, whether Putin is there or not.