Will Russia’s election bring a turn towards the left? And that is a serious question

If the Communist Party markedly increase their presence in the Duma, writes Mary Dejevsky, they could become the opposition the Kremlin and United Russia have never had

A demonstration in Moscow in support of opposition candidates for the elections this month (AFP)

Among the spate of elections this autumn – from Norway, just completed, to Canada, just ahead, to Germany in 10 days’ time – the elections in Russia this weekend have been somewhat neglected outside those who watch the country closely. Nor is the flurry of electoral activity elsewhere the only reason. There are plenty of others.

One is that these are not leadership elections, as such. They are elections to the parliament, or Duma, which is widely and sometimes wrongly regarded as little more than a rubber stamp for the Kremlin. Thus Vladimir Putin’s future is not at stake, at least not directly; his current presidential term has another three years to run. Nor is there a candidate for outsiders to latch on to. Alexei Navalny, the one effective and charismatic politician who attracts interest outside Russia, is in a prison camp for a conviction described by the Council of Europe as “arbitrary and unreasonable”; many of his immediate team have left the country and many of his activists have been arrested.

There are also the perennial questions that arise with every Russian election: how far is the vote a genuine reflection of the popular will; how far will the elections be anything like free and fair, and how might they be rigged in the myriad ways that votes can be rigged, from fixing the nominations to manipulating the count? Underlying everything is the widespread assumption that the outcome is fore-ordained, and that one way or another the pro-Putin party, United Russia, will keep its majority; the whole process is just a charade.

None of this means, though, that the elections should be written off. There is such a thing as public opinion in Russia. There is a degree of choice within the restricted parameters, and younger Russians are highly connected, with a flourishing social media sphere, which means that the official state media no longer have a monopoly on the message. In recent years, critics of all hues have also started to field their own volunteer election observers in selected constituencies.

The Kremlin, for its part, is well aware, whether from the protests that followed elections in 2011 to 2012 or from looking across at past electoral turmoil in Ukraine and Belarus, that too much – and too obvious – interference can invite trouble. Which is why the often clumsy measures apparently taken to ensure a satisfactory result this year are worth noting, as they suggest a certain nervousness in the Kremlin, and the reasons are not hard to find.

Living standards in major cities have been stagnating, or even falling. Prices have been rising. The climate crisis has become an issue, following record temperatures and wildfires this summer, and the Covid-19 pandemic has exposed not only some of the weaknesses in the Russian health system – St Petersburg was especially hard hit – but the level of popular distrust, even disdain, of the central authorities. The low take-up of a Russian-made vaccine that appears to be highly effective, is a cause of particular concern.

The worry for the Kremlin would be that large numbers of people either stay away from the polls – turn-out being seen as a measure of positive citizen engagement – or that they turn up, but rebel by casting their vote for any party other than United Russia. And here, despite the Kremlin’s best efforts, hovers the spectral figure of the imprisoned Navalny.

He pioneered a concept of “smart” – or tactical, voting, according to which his supporters, in the absence of a “Navalny candidate” were encouraged to support whichever candidate had the best chance of defeating the United Russia nominee. His team developed an “app” to that end – which the Kremlin has predictably tried to suppress. But voters probably don’t need an app to figure out which candidate in their constituency would most likely come second, and might, if critical voters joined forces, stand a chance of winning.

And this is where these parliamentary elections could become more interesting than usual. Russia has a fluid and unstable party system – then again, so do many established democracies, France and Italy being cases in point. But there are four parties that have been a consistent presence in Russia since the 1990s. A party of power by whatever name (now United Russia); a right-wing nationalist party perversely called the Liberal Democrats; a liberal, mildly pro-western party called Yabloko (Apple), which has rarely reached the 5 per cent threshold to enter the Duma, and the Communist Party. There is also a more recent party, called Fair, or Just, Russia, which has MPs, and usually follows the Kremlin line.

But the party that most often comes second to United Russia is the Communist Party, (the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, CPRF), and the communists appear to be having something of a moment, quite aside from any advice from Navalny about tactical voting. They still have the same leader – Gennady Zyuganov – they had when the Soviet Union collapsed. They still have some of the most durable party structures and some of the most professional organisers in the business. I have also noticed, during visits to Russia in the past five or so years, that – unlike most of the other parties – the communists have started to attract a new generation of supporters.

Their calls for social justice – that were little more than rhetoric in Soviet times when the Communist Party held a monopoly on power – have gained a new resonance, given the extremes of rich and poor that coexist in today’s Russia. They also chime well with Navalny’s first, and arguably most popular pitch, his campaign against corruption. So the idea of Navalny supporters, Kremlin critics in general, and communists making common cause is not as far-fetched as it might initially seem.

How much of a threat the communist vote – whether cast from conviction or tactically – might really pose to United Russia’s Duma majority can be questioned. United Russia currently holds 334 of the Duma’s 450 seats, so dislodging that majority would be hard, plus the combination of first-past the post and a party list system pretty much guarantees that United Russia will emerge as the largest party. Plus, past forecasts of disaster for United Russia, have invariably been proved wrong.

On the other hand, United Russia has been languishing in the polls – down to 20-30 per cent – while the Communist Party in some areas is nudging 40 per cent. The timing is also difficult. In 2016 United Russia benefitted from the huge popularity within Russia of the annexation of Crimea. Five years later the mood is much more subdued.

How far the Kremlin would tolerate a sharp reduction in United Russia’s majority and/or a conspicuously low turnout without massaging the results is a question. But any trend in that direction would inevitably be seen, both in Russia and abroad, as evidence of a decline in the Kremlin’s authority and power. As such, it could influence both policy in the short-term and Vladimir Putin’s thinking about his own prospects after 2024.

That is one reason why this weekend’s Duma elections are more significant than they may seem. But there is another reason. If the communists markedly increase their presence in the Duma, they could become the opposition the Kremlin and United Russia have never had. That in turn could launch a new period of debate in Russian politics, but also offer a salutary reminder to all those in Russia and abroad hoping for Russian politics to take a pro-western turn post-Putin, that it could take another course.

At the same time, a louder voice for the left in Russian politics might also suggest that the Russian political mood is more in tune with wider European politics than is often assumed. In Norway, in Germany – and in the UK, where Boris Johnson has coopted many big-state economic policies more commonly associated with Labour – economic ideas from the left seem to be enjoying a resurgence.

Whether it is the effect of the pandemic, a reflection of wider economic currents or a way of challenging entrenched power, one message from the Duma elections could be that Russians today are not so different or detached from the rest of Europe as the rest of Europe often thinks.