interview
A president without a program, pale opposing candidates, dubious voting conditions: the result of the election in Russia will be manipulated in every respect, says Russia expert Sabine Fischer. But what happens afterwards?
tagesschau.de: What program does Vladimir Putin present to his voters? Does he even have something like an election program?
Sabine Fischer: Putin does not have an election program in the true sense of the word, and you would look for that in vain on his campaign website. Putin’s program is Putin himself. It is about confirming his rule, which has now lasted 24 years. Politics no longer takes place in Russia. Over the past 15 to 20 years, the authoritarian regime has eliminated any form of political debate with alternative positions in a public space in which society can participate.
In this respect, Putin does not have to offer a program. What he stands for is, above all, war. In his address to the Federal Assembly, he made it very clear once again that the entire fate, the future of Russia depends on the war – and he himself as a person and his authoritarian rule.
How society is divided
tagesschau.de: There is no doubt that Putin will be confirmed in office. How do you explain the support that Putin still has in Russian society?
To person
Dr. Sabine Fischer is a senior fellow in the Eastern Europe and Eurasia research group at the Science and Politics Foundation. Her main topics include Russian foreign and security policy and unresolved conflicts in the EU’s eastern neighborhood. In 2023 she published “The Chauvinist Threat: Russia’s Wars and Europe’s Answers”.
Fischer: I also assume that Putin still has the support of a majority in society. However, one must assume that the result of this so-called election will be thoroughly rigged. There are independent Russian sociologists who try to determine the mood in society.
They are talking about a 25-50-25 division of Russian society: 25 percent convinced supporters of the war, then a large group in the middle of around 50 percent, which is basically open to manipulation, probably the majority supports Putin, might turn away from Putin in a different political situation.
And then another 25 percent who are against the war and the regime, but only a small proportion of them are willing to take action for their beliefs and accept the high personal risk that this entails. The bottom line is that the election result will probably be around 80 percent for Putin, surpassing the 2018 election result, but actual support is likely to be much lower.
“Everything is subordinate to war”
tagesschau.de: What will Putin use his next term in office for?
Fischer: First and foremost, he will continue the war. At the beginning of this third year of war, everything in Russia, domestic politics and all aspects of foreign policy, is subordinated to the war. This was certainly not planned at the start of the full invasion in February 2022. But the expectation of a blitzkrieg has proven to be a catastrophic fallacy. To date, Russia has not managed to win this war and will therefore, even after this election, subordinate the direction of all areas of political life to the victorious end of this war.
tagesschau.de: This is a model that relies heavily on government impulses in economic and social policy. Aren’t the inherent contradictions at some point too big and risky for Putin?
Fischer: You can’t rule that out. At the moment the coordinates are relatively stable. As long as it is possible to keep the Russian economy running, even with declining momentum, so that no major socio-economic crisis occurs, as long as the regime can assure the elite, and above all the population, that the war is being won, possible destabilizing factors can be isolated. However, if there were to be a shock, a major economic crisis with massive effects on the population, or noticeably increasing military pressure and major losses of territory in Ukraine, then it could be that this balance gets out of control and that there are withdrawal movements in the Ukraine elites and protests among the population.
In the fall of 2022 and also in the first half of 2023, we saw that when the Russian armed forces come under pressure in Ukraine, it immediately has domestic political consequences. When Putin announced partial mobilization after the Ukrainian reconquests, it triggered a strong backlash – demonstrations, hundreds of thousands of people who left the country at the time. The conflict between Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin and the Ministry of Defense and the General Staff in the spring of 2023, which ended in a mutiny, were also moments of instability that had a lot to do with the situation on the battlefield in Ukraine. But as long as things are going well for the Russian regime in the war, they do not have to fear that significant domestic opposition will emerge.
Recruit without further mobilization
tagesschau.de: From this point of view, a new mobilization, which is constantly being speculated about, would pose a significant risk for Putin?
Fischer: I don’t expect that. The regime will continue to be cautious here – and it is not absolutely necessary militarily at the moment, especially since the regime has worked over the past 1.5 years to be able to continue recruiting without declaring a major mobilization.
From a Russian perspective, the US presidential election in November is important. The hope is that Donald Trump will win and that Western support for Ukraine will collapse afterwards, meaning that Russia will be able to “harvest” Ukraine without having to make even greater efforts.
tagesschau.de: Didn’t the candidacies of Boris Nadeshin and Yekaterina Duntsova also show what potential for protest still exists?
Fischer: That’s the only interesting thing about this election. In the context of these suppressed candidacies, it has become clear that there is war weariness in Russian society and a potential for social mobilization against the war. This was also shown during the funeral of Alexei Navalny and in the support, especially for Boris Nadezhdin. Significantly more than 200,000 people have taken the high personal risk of going to his contact points and supporting his candidacy with their signature.
And given the risk involved, one must certainly multiply the number of one’s supporters. Because this state has become so comprehensively and brutally repressive that many people are too afraid to sign.
“Opposing candidates have no political weight”
tagesschau.de: There are formally three opposing candidates – Nikolai Kharitonov from the Communist Party, Duma vice-chairman Vladimir Davankov with his New People party and Leonid Slutskij from the right-wing populist LDPR. Do they even begin to live up to this label?
Fischer: No, they won’t. They are people from the second row. The Kremlin has apparently tried to encourage more well-known political figures from the New People’s Communist Party to run for office in the hope that they can mobilize more and thus contribute to voter turnout. They apparently rejected this request because there is nothing to gain in terms of reputation in this election. Instead, Kharitonov and Dawnankov are now running, as well as Slutsky, who is not even remotely able to follow in the footsteps of his predecessor Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who successfully played the role of an extremist opposition clown within the political system for a long time.
These candidates have no political weight, it is a pure simulation of competition. That’s why they are well below five percent in the surveys. This is what makes this election different from all previous presidential elections. It was always clear to them: the candidate for power would win, usually Putin, in 2008 Dmitri Medvedev. But in addition to the systemic opponents, there were still one or two actors from the extra-systemic opposition who could run. This year’s election won’t even allow that.
“The context today is dictatorial”
tagesschau.de: If one draws a comparison with the previous elections, where does this presidential election fall in terms of the extent of manipulation and suppression?
Fischer: In my view, it is the most rigged election that has taken place in post-Soviet Russia. On the procedural and technical level, the regime has further developed its tools for manipulation. Election Day is no longer one day, but rather three days. This opens the door to a lot of manipulation. Electronic voting has been expanded. Here, too, one can assume that there will be massive manipulation. But the big manipulation doesn’t take place on election day, but in the run-up to the elections – with a completely manipulated, controlled field of candidates. The context of this election is the result of a long trend that has accelerated and deepened dramatically in 2022. Russia is now a dictatorship. It is a choice in this dictatorial system. There is war, there has been wartime censorship since 2022, there is no longer any independent media at all.
And there is no longer any independent election observation. There was still an OSCE election observation mission in 2018 – but not this year. Civil society election observation, which has become highly professional in the past 15 years as a result of the confrontation with the increasingly authoritarian regime, has also been deliberately destroyed. All of this – especially under the conditions of a full-scale war against Ukraine – adds up to the picture of the most heavily manipulated election of the past 30 years.
The interview was conducted by Eckart Aretz, tagesschau.de