Candidates backed by poisoned Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny won in several major cities during local elections in Russia on Sept. 13.
However, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party got majorities in all regional legislatures up for a vote and won in all gubernatorial races that were held. Election watchdogs said these victories were made possible due to large-scale voting fraud, which is denied by Russian authorities.
The elections are important because they are seen as a rehearsal of the 2021 election of Russia’s legislature, the State Duma. They also come after Navalny’s poisoning and amid Putin’s plummeting approval rating and unprecedented protests in Khabarovsk Krai and Russia’s close ally Belarus.
Opposition victories
Russian elections are held both according to party-list proportional representation and to majoritarian voting in single-member districts. Although it could have been a problem for United Russia to win according to party lists when its popularity fell, candidates explicitly or tacitly backed by the party usually won in single-member districts because the opposition was fragmented and had less resources.
Navalny has come up with the “smart vote” strategy to counter this trend: backing the strongest registered candidate from any party other than United Russia in a specific district and focus all resources on this candidate.
As a result of the strategy, the opposition won majorities in the city councils of Tomsk and Novosibirsk in Siberia on Sept. 13.
United Russia’s representation in the Novosibirsk city council fell to 22 out of 50 seats from 33 seats during the previous election. Sergei Boiko, head of Navalny’s campaign headquarters in Novosibirsk, became a member of Novosibirsk’s city council.
In the Tomsk city council, United Russia got just 11 out of 37 seats, compared with 22 seats during the previous election. Kseniya Fadeyeva, head of Navalny’s campaign headquarters in Tomsk, and her deputy Andrei Fateev became members of the city council.
In the Tambov city council, Rodina, a socially conservative party seen as loyal to the Kremlin, received a majority of seats, compared with a United Russia majority in the previous election.
Navalny’s poisoning
The cities where Navalny’s candidates won – Tomsk and Novosibirsk – were the ones where he campaigned before being poisoned on Aug. 20. They are also known as opposition strongholds with less voting fraud than in other regions.
On Aug. 20, Navalny fell ill during a flight from Tomsk to Moscow and was hospitalized at an emergency clinic in Omsk in Siberia, where the plane made an emergency landing. He fell into a coma and was placed on a lung ventilator.
Navalny was subsequently flown to a German clinic for treatment. German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Sept. 2 that Navalny had been poisoned with a Novichok nerve agent – a chemical weapon invented in the Soviet Union.
On Sept. 7. medics brought Navalny out of his medically induced coma.
Navalny’s supporters blamed the poisoning on the Kremlin, which was denied by Russian authorities. They argued that the aim was to kill or incapacitate him before the Sept. 13 elections.
The poisoning also dealt a blow to the main opposition leader as the Kremlin was increasingly worried about unprecedented protests against dictator Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus and large-scale demonstrations against the arrest of Khabarovsk Krai’s popular governor, Sergei Furgal, in Russia’s Far East.
In 2018, Sergei Skripal, a former Russian security officer, and his daughter Yulia were poisoned in the U.K. with the Novichok nerve agent, although they survived. Anatoly Chepiga and Alexander Mishkin – officers of Russia’s GRU intelligence service – are suspected by British police of trying to murder them and of murdering Dawn Sturgess, a British woman who died after coming into contact with the Novichok.
Kremlin victories
However, United Russia won majorities in all regional legislatures where elections were held on Sept. 13: those of Belgorod, Voronezh, Kaluga, Kostroma, Kurgan, Magadan, Novosibirsk, Ryazan and Chelyabinsk oblasts, as well as those of Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous District and Komi Republic.
In most regions United Russia got less than in previous elections. The worst result was in Komi Republic, where the party received 28.8 percent according to party-list proportional representation, compared with 58 percent in 2015.
All candidates backed by United Russia won in gubernatorial races in their regions in the first round. These include Irkutsk, Kaluga, Arkhangelsk, Bryansk, Leningrad, Kostroma, Smolensk, Penza, Tambov and Rostov oblasts, as well as Perm, Kamchatka and Krasnodar krais, Tatarstan, Chuvash and Komi republics, Jewish Autonomous Oblast and Russian-occupied Sevastopol in Ukraine’s Crimea peninsula.
The international community and Ukraine did not recognize the Sevastopol election in Russian-annexed Crimea.
The Kremlin’s victories in those regions were made possible largely due to large-scale vote rigging, according to independent election watchdogs such as Golos.
For the first time in Russia’s history, the election was held effectively for three days, not on one day – on Sept. 11-13. During the first two days, election monitoring was made difficult or impossible, enabling large-scale voting fraud, according to election watchdogs and voting monitors.
In many races, especially gubernatorial ones, the authorities also made it easier for United Russia to win by refusing to register most opposition candidates.
