(DailyAnswer.org) – Vladimir Putin’s rivals in the 2024 Russian presidential election appear to be sabotaging their chances of winning. As reported by Agentstvo, a Russian investigative site, several candidates, including State Duma member Sergey Baburin, have not even disclosed the locations of their headquarters so that voters can add their signatures to signal their support for candidates. Other candidates have outright said they do not expect to win ahead of the election, which is set to take place from the 15th to the 17th of March 2024. Candidates are overall not being very aggressive in their campaigns, and Boris Nadezhdin is the only candidate to explicitly criticize Putin and the war in Ukraine. The Kremlin dismissed Nadezhdin in January, making it clear that they do not see him as a threat to the regime.
In December 2023, political opponents said that the election was an opportunity to change Russia, and though Alexei Navalny’s aide Leonid Volkov accepted the inevitability of Putin’s victory, he stressed that the purpose of the election for the opposition was to alter the country’s political agenda. Navalny, a renowned critic of Putin, is currently in the Siberian IK-3 penal colony, and in January 2024, he made his first court appearance from the Arctic prison and joked about the cold conditions. The Kremlin is confident that Putin will be elected for a fifth term due to overwhelming support in the country, which is at a rate of 80% according to polls. Russian journalist Andrey Pertsev argued that the outcome of the leaders of two political parties dropping out of the race and being replaced by spoiler candidates and stand-ins has undermined the Kremlin’s narrative about the supposed significance of the election. Pertsev argued that Putin’s largest rival in terms of formal status is ultra-nationalist Leonid Slutsky, whose run will only be seen as successful if he gets at least 5-6% of the vote, and that Slutsky clearly considers this impossible.
Russia’s elections have in the past been marred with manipulation, ballot box stuffing, and compulsory voting. Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesman, has repeatedly said that Putin’s victory is almost guaranteed, referring to Russia’s elections as an “expensive bureaucracy” rather than a democracy. According to Tatiana Stanovaya, founder of R.Politik, a political analysis firm, the opposition campaign is completely under the control of the Kremlin rather than legitimate rivals.
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