Russia: Putin to easily win March elections amid lack of competition

• Only three candidates are allowed to run against Putin
• Two anti-war candidates were barred from participation
• Kremlin targets 75% win for Putin with 70% turnout, which seems easy to achieve

The presidential elections will be held in a three-day vote scheduled for March 15-17. The president is elected for six years and there is no doubt that Vladimir Putin will go for his fifth presidential term. Probably the only uncertainty about the coming elections is who of the remaining three candidates will finish second in what is probably the least competitive election in Russia's recent history.

Only four presidential candidates were allowed to participate in the elections out of 15 initial pretenders. There were few big names or noticeable campaigns among the dropped-out candidates, most of which failed to collect enough supporters or signatures to participate in the elections. Two anti-war candidates are noteworthy as they were both denied participation by the Election Committee: Duntsova and Nadezhdin. Daria Duntsova is a small regional politician and was almost unknown before the registration of candidates. Having clearly announced her program as anti-war, she was denied registration at the initial stage of the process back in December, with the Central Election Committee claiming flaws in her documents. Boris Nadezhdin is an experienced, but relatively unpopular politician, who also declared the end of the war a cornerstone of his presidential program. He was allowed to collect signatures from his supporters to participate in the election race. Though Nadezhdin insisted he collected more than 200k signatures out of the required 100k, the Central Election Committee ruled that the share of invalid signatures in the 105k signatures that he submitted was 9%, above the allowed margin of 5%. Nadezhdin will still try to contest the decision in the Supreme Court, but we believe the campaign is already over for him. Most likely the Kremlin planned to allow Nadezhdin to collect signatures to show how low support for peace is in Russia and was surprised by his high result, but it was clearly unacceptable for the Kremlin to let Nadezhdin advocate for peace for one more month during the campaign.

The four remaining candidates are current president Putin, the leader of the LDPR party Slutskiy, the deputy head of the Communist Party Kharitonov and the head of the New People party Davankov. For Putin, this would be the fifth election, Kharitonov is running for second time, while for Davankov and Slutskiy this would be first experience. All three challengers to Putin are less popular than Nadezhdin and according to the polls they would get only a fraction of the support their parties enjoy. They also have very small chances of gathering votes from the opposition to Putin's regime, due to being regarded as part of the system.

As a result, Putin is likely to win with 70-80% of votes in his favour. The Kremlin itself aims at 75% support with 70% voter turnout, which would allow it to claim that more than 50% of the population supports the acting president and his policy. The result would not be difficult to achieve. Since the start of the war in Ukraine, the regime has jailed the most prominent opposition politicians and forced the remaining ones to switch sides or flee the country. With only three rivals it would be easy for Putin to secure a record-high level of support, as many citizens see no difference between the three remaining competitors and would likely ignore the procedure all alone. Putin's system of rigging the election is based mostly on stealing the votes of the abstained population and forcing public sector employees to vote for him and the ruling party, so there is unlikely to be any problems with reaching the required level of voter turnout as well. According to a VCIOM election poll he had 75% support as of Feb 10th.

Leonid Slutskiy is the current leader of the LDPR party after its infamous leader Zhirinovskiy died in 2022. Zhirinovskiy was a populist politician known for his provocative speeches and suggestions as well as very aggressive approach toward debates and criticism of his political rivals. Broadly regarded by many apolitical Russians as "this-funny-politician" he regularly managed to secure the second place in presidential elections and kept his otherwise very generic party in Parliament. His successor Slutskiy has shown none of these qualities so far. His campaign is based on representing him as a successor to Zhirinovskiy's ideas and the candidate has not released a program so far. According to the VCIOM election poll, he had 4% support as of Feb 10th.

Nikolay Kharitonov is a second-tier candidate for the Communist Party, which nominates him when the expected results are poor, which was the case also in 2004. Otherwise, the Communist Party usually bet on its eternal leader Zyuganov, who has ruled the party since the breakout of the USSR. The Communist Party is still the second most popular party in Russia enjoying the support of the senior population. As one could expect Kharitonov's program is based on criticism of capitalism and glorifying the good living conditions in the Soviet Union. According to the VCIOM election poll, he also had 4% support as of Feb 10th.

Vladislav Davankov is the leader of the New People party which emerged with the informal support of the Kremlin during the 2020 Parliamentary elections. The party positions itself as liberal and focuses mostly on economic issues, SME interests and civil rights. Due to this the party is closer to the typical opposition voter than any other, but it does not pose any real opposition to the Kremlin when it comes to sensitive issues. The party's MPs voted in favour of the recognition of DPR and LPR rebel states when it was clear that Russia would use the recognition to justify the invasion of Ukraine. Later the party supported the annexation of Ukrainian territories. In both cases the decision was unanimously supported in Parliament, so the New People is not some hawkish party - it just does not really oppose the current regime despite totally different principles declared. We would say that the party also did slightly better job of attracting opposition support: Davankov criticized the decision to ban Nadezhdin and Duntsova from participation and promised to incorporate some points from Nadezhdin's program into his own. However, we see no chance that Davankov will openly criticize the war: that would allow him to produce better results in the coming elections, but destroy his future political career at the same time. According to the VCIOM election poll, he also had 5% support.

While it is clear what we can expect from the elections, the question remains what comes next. There is a certain level of concern about a potential new forceful draft to be announced soon after the elections, as Putin will likely want to improve his position at the frontline as much as possible before the elections in the US. The previous mobilisation delivered a short-term blow to Putin's ratings. From an economic point of view, there is a risk of a negative shock to the RUB exchange rate and inflation: both indicators historically tend to deteriorate after the elections, as prior to them they are kept through informal control measures. However, we do not expect significant acceleration of CPI inflation or exchange rate depreciation due to the tight monetary stance.