Russia’s Duma Elections

Russians vote for the State Duma on December 4 in an important test of the strength and legitimacy of the ruling United Russia party before the March presidential elections that will likely return Vladimir Putin to the presidency. In a video Q&A, Matthew Rojansky looks at the upcoming contest and explains that the economy is the critical issue for voters in a country still struggling to fully recover from the financial crisis. If United Russia receives much less than the supermajority it won four years ago or if turnout is below 50 percent, that would send a message that Russians are dissatisfied with the status quo. But, Rojansky says, more dramatic political upsets are unlikely—at least for now.

• How important are Russia’s December parliamentary elections?
   
• What issues will shape the elections?
   
• Will the elections be monitored and fair?
   
• What influence will Putin have over the Duma elections?
   
• What is the likely outcome of the vote?
   
• What does the opposition want?
   
• Will the Russian youth play a role in the elections and Russia’s future?
   
• Will the Duma elections affect the March presidential contest?
   

How important are Russia’s December parliamentary elections?

The elections on December 4 in Russia are for the Duma, the lower house of the parliament. This is now the only popularly-elected house because Putin changed the upper house to be appointed by the president. Elections will be important symbolically. In the last elections in 2007, the United Russia party won over 60 percent of the vote, and the turnout was over 60 percent as well. That’s important as a broad legitimator of not only the ruling party, which Putin and Medvedev both in some sense lead—even though technically Putin hadn’t been a member of it even when he was heading the parliament—but also legitimating the Putinist system as a whole. Putinism benefits from having people come out and vote and put their stamp of approval on the system as it is.

If the turnout or the vote for United Russia ends up being dramatically lower than what is was last time, certainly if it ends up being lower than 50 percent, that will send a message that people are broadly dissatisfied with the system and Putin. I think it is very unlikely that the vote for United Russia would be lower than 50 percent, at the end of the day that won’t be permitted. On the other hand, if it is legitimately higher, or if it’s the same as what it was, that will send a different message that people are satisfied with the recovery from the crisis, the basic stability of the system, and the basic rights and freedoms that they have today, which are better than what they had twenty years ago under the Soviet system, although obviously not perfect.
 

What issues will shape the elections?

This election will be very much like American elections of the recent past—that it’s about the economy, stupid. Russians will go to the polls thinking about how their bank accounts are doing, do they have a job, has their salary been reduced, and has it stayed down. That happened to a lot of Russians, including some members of the emerging middle class in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and that is very significant. Particularly when you get outside the major cities, people are still hurting from the crisis. Some people have just not caught up altogether. They were left behind since the 1990s and the collapse of the Soviet system. Their jobs never came back and they’re still waiting for prosperity.

So a lot of people will be dissatisfied, but then there are others who are basically fine with the system as it is, they’re enjoying the trickle down of the natural resource wealth that Russia has and that it sells on the international markets. 

The bottom line is people will go out to the polls and they will vote in a way that reflects their feelings about their basic levels of prosperity and welfare right now. By and large, they do not see the election as a referendum about Russian democracy. A handful of people will lodge a protest vote, perhaps by voting for another party, or voting against everyone—that’s an option that exists in the Russian electoral system and in all post-Soviet electoral systems, and a lot of people won’t vote as a result of that. But this is not fundamentally about the political system as much as it is about the welfare of the Russian people.
 

Will the elections be monitored and fair?

This is the first time since 2004 that Russia has allowed Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) observers into the country to monitor an election. The OSCE is a pretty broad and inclusive group; it is viewed as widely legitimate. Generally, when they say an election is free and fair, it is; when they say it’s not, it’s not. This is not an organization that is in the pocket of anyone. The Russians have objected to it in the past because they can’t tell it what its conclusions should be.

The big problem with any kind of observer delegation for the elections, but particularly with the OSCE, is that they haven’t been there all along. The headlines in the media tell part of the story. For example, the Russian government has not allowed some liberal parties—including notably the Party of People’s Freedom, which is headed by a number of former very senior officials from the 1990s—to participate in the elections. But if you’re observing the elections, you’d like to look back over the last year or several years and see if the conditions that have shaped the competition will culminate in the election, and that’s hard for an observation mission to do even when you have long-term observers, because that’s really only a month and a half or two months. So this is about the system as a whole, and you need a system-wide observer mission to judge it appropriately.
 

What influence will Putin have over the Duma elections?

Irrespective of whether Putin appears on the party list for United Russia, he is the flag bearer of the ruling party. He has long been viewed as the sole figure who shapes the agenda for the party, even though Medvedev will now formally be heading that list and is likely to be made prime minister after Putin wins the election in March and then becomes the president in May. Putin really is the person who defines the agenda for the ruling party, both on the legislative side and on the executive side. That separation of powers is rather informal in the Russian context. So in a sense, a vote for the United Russia party is an endorsement of Putin’s agenda as it’s understood by the people.

That doesn’t mean, however, that on December 4 people will feel the sense of obligation that they would feel personally toward Putin, or that they will even come out. Typically, the polls have reflected that the United Russia party trails Putin in popularity by 20 or 30 percent, and that could be reflected in the election as well. Obviously, if Putin is at 70 percent popularity, subtract 30 percent from that and you’re at 40 percent. That’s about where United Russia is polling right now, somewhere in the mid-forties. If that’s the result of the election, then that will send a negative signal, and it is a two-way street: if Putin is the guy who represents United Russia’s agenda, then he is also hurt by a bad showing for the party.
 

What is the likely outcome of the vote?

It’s more likely than not that the United Russia party is going to win more than 50 percent. In the past, it’s won above 60 percent. Its popularity right now is below 50 percent, but I think there’s going to be a lot of acrobatics between now and election day—there already has been some. There may be some tampering with the vote. It probably won’t happen procedurally during the voting but it would have something to do with the way the results were tabulated. There will also be regional variations. For example, it’s more important that United Russia does very well in the major cities than it is in regions that are largely irrelevant to what goes on in Moscow or St. Petersburg.

It might be a slimmer margin of victory than before and that will be interpreted as something of a complaint or a protest against the system as it is, but that won’t necessarily tar Vladimir Putin himself. It would be more about general disaffection—but we still like the leader, we still like the father of the nation. I don’t expect this to be a major signal of how Putin would do in March.
 

What does the opposition want?

If you could describe a broader liberal opposition, they’re looking for reform. First and foremost, they’re looking to see Putin and Medvedev follow through on their longtime promises—rooting out corruption and making sure that the system really works according to law. The problem is that it’s very hard to eliminate corruption at a micro-level in people’s day-to-day lives. When officials look up at the system, they look all the way up to the Kremlin, and they see that corruption is tolerated at very high levels. And, indeed, in some cases it is depended upon to grease the wheels and make the system work. So they will have a lot of trouble with the corruption issue.

Another major interest of the liberal opposition is economic modernization. This is also a theme that Putin and Medvedev have picked up, trying to capture some of the center and some of this liberal sentiment in the electorate. But they are going to have a lot of trouble with economic modernization as well. Russia is a country that—other than its extractive industries which make a lot of money but depend very heavily on where the global economy is going for prices of commodities—has not been significantly reformed since the end of the Soviet era. A lot of the basic industries still look very much like they did in the 1970s and 1980s and that means they are not competitive. Putin and Medvedev have begun to change that and there are a few bright spots, but the problem is going to be how do you take something like the Skolkovo Initiative—which is the goal of creating a Silicon Valley outside of Moscow—and make that more than an experiment in a petri dish. Without changing the basic infrastructure of the society, both psychologically and physically, it is going to be very hard to produce that on a broader scale.
 

Will the Russian youth play a role in the elections and Russia’s future?

The younger generation of Russians right now is still an emerging story. On the one hand, you have some members of the first fully post-Soviet generation who have nonetheless signed up for an awfully Soviet-like nomenklatura system. They’d like to become bureaucrats—managers or executives—in state-linked energy or other major companies. They would like to benefit from the system of power and wealth as it exists. They are dependents of the system and will therefore be supportive of the system; where you sit is where you stand.

The other distinct group in this generation is very entrepreneurial and energetic, having been shaped in this crucible of the 1990s. This group doesn’t have a tremendous amount of patience for the stagnation that appears to be gripping the political life of the country and certainly the big state oligarchic business of the country. They don’t benefit a tremendous amount from that.
 
That said, I don’t think they’re at the tipping point today where they’re ready to pour out into the street. But they are voting with their feet, gradually. They’re squirrelling their money away in the West, spending as much time as they can out of the country, and traveling tremendously because they have the freedom to travel.

So that’s the dichotomy that’s emerging among the youth today. But I also would say that it is an unwritten story because obviously they have a long future ahead. And more than that, they look out ahead—and the government does as well—and see an unsolvable problem, which is declining demographics. You are going to have a lot more people moving into retirement, people needing pretty significant medical care given the condition of the health care system, and these things are all very expensive.

At the same time, it’s likely that revenue from energy and other natural resource extraction is going to plateau. At a minimum, we know that it’s going to be unpredictable—energy prices are always unpredictable—and that means that the state budget at various points may not be able to sustain the expenses that it’s going to incur. Unless the international community comes to Russia’s rescue with trillions of dollars—which is pretty unlikely—the younger generation is going to be taxed to pay those debts, and that’s where the rubber meets the road of the disaffection for this 1990s generation. It isn’t going to accept such debts after years of working hard, innovating, and helping to grow the economy in the face of a relatively stagnant system.
 

Will the Duma elections affect the March presidential contest?

Some of the themes that are likely to emerge very strongly and have emerged already in the campaign will grow stronger in the approach to March. One of Vladimir Putin’s goals is typically to nip dissent and problems in the bud. That’s not to say that he uses force to crush every problem. Sometimes he actually buys off his critics, sometimes he creates a distraction, and sometimes he actually solves the problem. He’s going to be looking to respond to the issues he detects between December and March, so that he can get a better result.

It is important to bear in mind, however, that the way that Russian voters tend to look at an individual, particularly an individual like Putin who is viewed with such great regard and, broadly speaking, appreciation for what he’s done for the country, is very different than the way they look at institutions and the system as a whole. So when they’re voting for a party list, like the United Russia party list in the upcoming election, there’s a kind of anonymity to doing that, that maybe enables people to protest a little bit more with their vote. There’s less of a sense of personal obligation to go out and vote in the first place, whereas if you graft Putin onto the wider sweep of Russian history, and you compare him to past Russian Soviet and imperial Russian leaders, I think there’s a real sense of identification among many Russians that this is our leader, this is the father figure, and when the state asks us to go out and vote for him, which the state will do for him, we will go out and vote. I think that message has been sent and received.