To understand the significance of the ‘vote’ in Russia, one need only look at the new exodus

Turin. A parliament of war: united and homogeneous. This is the outcome of the elections to renew the State Duma, the lower house of the Russian Parliament, held between Friday and Sunday. Far from being a reflection of the pluralism that exists in society, the electoral process in Russia is directly managed by the presidential administration and the security services to accommodate relations between the various components of the ‘vertical of power’ and, at the same time, to provide a showcase of legitimacy for the President’s personal regime. The outgoing Speaker of the Duma, Vyacheslav Volodin, summed this up rather effectively with a slogan during the final session of the eighth parliamentary term, held in August: ‘There are many parties, but there is only one homeland: Russia, Putin, Victory!’. The provisional results do, in fact, correspond to the independent predictions made on the eve of the election.

If the polls were to show a rise in turnout – to demonstrate the resilience of the Russian people – the count was set to deliver the ruling party a greater number of seats than in the previous election. And so it was. Thanks in part to electronic voting, turnout was up – at 56.6 per cent, the highest in 15 years – and United Russia’s result was inflated beyond even the most optimistic expectations. Whilst in the proportional representation segment Putin’s party secured ‘only’ 57.9 per cent (in 2021 it had fallen short of an absolute majority), in the first-past-the-post segment it won in as many as 208 of the 225 single-member constituencies. Among those elected are all twenty veterans of the ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine, who stood as candidates for the occasion. Overall, therefore, United Russia will have a growing contingent of MPs: at least 341 out of 450, well above the constitutional two-thirds majority and perhaps even exceeding the record set in 2016 (two years after the annexation of Crimea and Sevastopol).

As a reward for their support of the single-party majority, the crumbs went to the parties of the so-called ‘systemic opposition’ – those groups which, despite having an electoral base, depend on the favour of the presidential administration for their survival. As in 2021, only four other lists passed the 5 per cent threshold, all a fair way behind United Russia: the Communists (13.6 per cent), the national-liberals of the LDPR (8.9 per cent), the centrists of Novyye Lyudi (7.9 per cent) and the social-populists of Fair Russia (just above the threshold). In the single-member constituencies, however, the final battle was fought by the democratic opposition party Yabloko, which had been excluded by the Supreme Court in mid-August from the proportional representation race. Of the 225 candidates, 127 suffered the same fate as the federal list, whilst 98 remained on the ballot paper. Despite orders from above to prevent even a single pacifist candidate from entering the Duma, Yabloko’s candidates gave United Russia a run for its money in many constituencies, from St Petersburg to Tomsk. Even in Moscow, in ten out of sixteen districts, Yabloko came second or third – a sign that support for this list, once affiliated with ALDE, was genuinely on the rise, prompting the presidential administration to backtrack and obstruct its participation.

Faced with a remote-controlled vote, which no OSCE delegation was able to observe, the strategy of the opposition at home has, in short, once again diverged from that of the opposition in exile. Whilst Yabloko called on voters to vote for its own candidates (where applicable) and to spoil their ballot papers for the proportional representation section, the opposition in exile pushed for the ‘smart vote’ (umnoe golosovanye), that is, for any party other than United Russia, in line with what Alexey Navalny had previously advocated. Moreover, while Yabloko dispatched its own list representatives and observers to polling stations – some of whom were subsequently barred from the counting process – the opposition in exile called on its fellow citizens, as a sign of protest, to go to the polling station at midday on Sunday, so as to avoid online voting and night-time electoral fraud.

In the end, however, more than any other electoral strategy, it seems that ‘voting with one’s feet’ is what really pays off. While the triumph of United Russia may herald a new wave of mobilisation, escaping the escalation of war and repression is the only truly viable path. As social media is awash with stories of a new Russian exodus, border crossings into Armenia, Georgia and Kazakhstan are once again, as in 2022, becoming crowded.