The last performance. The failure of the Kremlin in the elections will lead to a change in the entire party system

The price paid by the Kremlin for the formal victory of “United Russia” looks too high if we consider that its colossal efforts and considerable financial investments were intended only to elect an obedient Duma. Only half a trillion rubles, or half a percent of GDP, were spent on payments to schoolchildren, pensioners and security officials. This is not counting regional gifts in Moscow and St. Petersburg. The price of “victories” in Moscow, St. Petersburg and Khabarovsk is difficult to calculate, since they were bought, in part, on credit, and it will take a long time to pay for them.

Other major projects of recent times can be added to the super-costly Duma elections: constitutional reform, the government of Mikhail Mishustin and his programs, which aim to make the state more effective in the eyes of citizens in the coming years, and their citizens, life is better and more fun. regional management centers (SDGs), an electronic voting system – all of this is sharpened for 2024. For the long term, and not at all for the 2021 elections, a total cleanup of the political and media space was carried out this year.

Electoral card

In the elections, Russia is not a mainland, but an archipelago, and an archipelago in motion. This archipelago consists of both regions that sometimes look monolithic, sometimes not, and of individual cities, especially large ones, which often behave quite differently from the surrounding areas.

The pattern of electoral geography can sometimes change dramatically. For example, in Komi the situation changed after the memorable arrest of Vyacheslav Gaizer and a large group of the regional elite in 2015. Since then, a relatively calm region with quite controlled voting has become a stronghold of the opposition to the authorities, and the change of governors is no longer helping. And Kuzbass, where the founder and long-term leader of the Sultanate Aman Tuleev in 2018 was relatively gently replaced by Sergei Tsivilev, and keeps an electoral anomaly, however, gradually absorbing.

According to the observation of political scientist Alexander Kynev, polarization took place in the last elections, and a number of regions with half-fair election results drifted towards the electoral sultanates – regions with controlled voting, where the elites draw the numbers needed by their bosses. According to various estimates, we have about five dozen of them, which is 2/5 of the voters and up to 3/4 of the votes for the party in power. The Kremlin would be glad to further increase the number of votes in its favor in the sultanates, but there is nowhere further – the number of voters does not allow.

News from the fields: good and bad

In these elections, it was important for the Kremlin not only to demonstrate the overall result, but also to avoid symbolic defeats and high-profile public scandals. With the exception of electronic voting in Moscow, this goal seems to have been achieved. But in politics, as in life in general, you have to pay for everything.

The Kremlin exponentially cracked down on Navalny’s structures and defiantly, despite serious image losses due to discrediting the electronic voting it needed in 2024, nullified all the victories of the smart vote candidates in Moscow. These were mostly candidates from the Communist Party.

If the battle with Navalny was, in a sense, a shadow boxing for the Kremlin, then the main target of the real election participants was the communists. The negative campaign on the part of the Kremlin turned out to be, in part, a lifting force for the sharply risen Communist Party of the Russian Federation, which began to turn from an imitation opposition into a real one. The communists received a significant increase in protest votes throughout the country, especially in the Far East, where the Liberal Democratic Party was traditionally strong.

It is the situation with the Communist Party that is now becoming the main nerve center of political development. And the Kremlin, through whose efforts this situation was largely created, has become, unwillingly, a blind instrument of smart voting. Carried away by the struggle with individual candidates of the UG, he played a positional victory for the only real political party in the country, turning it from a pocket one into a real opposition.