Local elections held across Russia on Sept. 8 have yielded mixed results for both the Kremlin and the opposition.
On the one hand, candidates backed by opposition leader Alexei Navalny performed well in local legislative elections in Moscow, St. Petersburg and some regions of Siberia and the Far East.
On the other, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party got over 50 percent of the vote in all 16 gubernatorial races held across the country, allowing them to avoid a run-off vote.
Numerous independent observers, including the Golos election watchdog and Navalny’s own team, reported massive voting fraud nationwide, which they say is one of the reasons for United Russia’s victories. The party of power has struggled with waning popularity for the last decade.
The most shocking reports and videos of vote-rigging came from St. Petersburg, where observers witnessed blatant ballot box-stuffing and falsified polling place reports.
The authorities denied rigging the elections.
Navalny’s team also attributed United Russia’s wins to the Kremlin’s refusal to register the strongest and most independent opposition candidates.
The average turnout in Russia amounted to 41.2 percent, according to the official results.
Biggest protests
The usually insignificant local elections have attracted attention worldwide after Russian authorities refused to register many independent candidates fielded by Navalny’s team in Moscow. This triggered the largest protests in Russia since 2011-2012, with about 60,000 people taking to the streets in August.
As part of his Smart Vote strategy, Navalny’s team then proceeded to back the strongest opposition candidates remaining in the race, although his own candidates had been rejected.
A lot of these candidates, including ones from the Communist Party and the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR), have been described as the “fake” opposition loyal to the Kremlin. However, Navalny has justified this strategy by the need to oust United Russia from power.
Moscow election
In the Moscow city council, United Russia-backed candidates and opposition candidates took 25 and 20 seats, respectively, implying a major win for the strategy of Navalny’s team.
Navalny argued that the opposition would have won a majority of 24 seats on the council if no voting fraud had taken place. He said that several seats had been stolen from them.
The opposition dramatically improved its performance compared with the 2014 election, when United Russia and the pro-government My Moscow faction dominated the council completely with 38 seats, and the opposition had just seven seats.
In a symbolic defeat, Andrei Metelsky, the head of United Russia’s Moscow branch and a deputy speaker of the Moscow city council, lost to an opposition candidate.
Navalny’s team launched their Moscow campaign by releasing an investigation into Metelsky in July. According to the investigation, his family owns hotels and a palace in Austria and real estate in Moscow and elsewhere in Russia worth a total of 7.5 billion rubles.
St. Petersburg race
Navalny also reported victories for many of the candidates backed by his team for the councils of St. Petersburg’s municipalities – sub-units of the city. However, United Russia also claimed to have scored a victory there, and the official results have not been finalized yet.
St. Petersburg’s controversial Kremlin-backed mayor – Alexander Beglov – won in the mayoral election with 64 percent of the vote.
Beglov’s strongest competitor, film director Vladimir Bortko, had withdrawn his candidacy just before the race, leaving Beglov with two weaker competitors.
According to some exit polls, Beglov had not surpassed the 50 percent threshold to win in the first round. Navalny’s team attributed his victory to large-scale voting fraud.
Khabarovsk Krai
In the Khabarovsk city council, United Russia suffered the most humiliating defeat, getting zero seats. The Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR), a nationalist party, received 34 out of 35 seats, and A Just Russia got one seat.
In Komsomolsk-on-Amur, a city in Khabarovsk Krai, United Russia did not get a single city council seat either. The LDPR won with 24 out of 25 seats, and the Communist Party got one.
An LDPR-backed candidate also became the mayor of Komsomolsk-on-Amur.
In Khabarovsk Krai’s regional legislature, the LDPR won in a landslide, while United Russia got just two seats out of 36. Fifty-six percent of regional voters cast their ballots for the LDPR, while 17 percent voted for the Communist Party, and 12.5 percent voted for United Russia.
The LDPR’s resounding victories became possible after Sergei Furgal, who was backed by the party, became governor of Khabarovsk Krai in 2018.
Other elections
In Irkutsk, incumbent Mayor Anatoly Lokot, who was backed by both the Communist Party and United Russia, won with 50.25 percent and Sergei Boiko, a candidate backed by Navalny, took second place with 18.56 percent. Candidates backed by United Russia won in the mayoral elections in Anadyr and Ulan-Ude.
In the Irkutsk city council, United Russia got the largest number of seats, but opposition parties took more than half of the seats combined. In the previous city council, opposition candidates had much less than 50 percent.
In Crimea, which Russia illegally annexed from Ukraine in 2014, United Russia won with 55 percent of the vote in an election for the Russian-installed illegal regional legislature. The party’s performance was significantly worse than in 2014, when it received 70 percent.
United Russia’s performance in the election for the illegal city council of the Russian-occupied city of Sevastopol deteriorated from 77 percent in 2014 to 38.5 percent in 2019.
