Vladimir Putin was unsurprisingly re-elected president of Russia on Sunday, with 87.28% of the vote, according to official results. Le Monde’s Moscow correspondent Benoît Vitkine answered readers’ questions about the repercussions of the election.
What lessons can we draw from Russia’s three-day presidential election? What consequences might it have for the continuation of the war in Ukraine? What does it say about Russian society?
With little margin for protest, Russians crowded outside polling stations at noon Sunday, on the last day of the election, apparently heeding an opposition call to express their displeasure with Putin. Still, the impending landslide underlined that the Russian leader would accept nothing less than full control of the country’s political system as he extended his nearly quarter-century rule for six more years.
Putin hailed the early results as an indication of “trust” and “hope” in him — while critics saw them as another reflection of the preordained nature of the election.
“Of course, we have lots of tasks ahead. But I want to make it clear for everyone: When we were consolidated, no one has ever managed to frighten us, to suppress our will and our self-conscience. They failed in the past and they will fail in the future,” Putin said at a meeting with volunteers after polls closed.
British Foreign Secretary David Cameron wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter: “The polls have closed in Russia, following the illegal holding of elections on Ukrainian territory, a lack of choice for voters and no independent OSCE monitoring. This is not what free and fair elections look like.
Any public criticism of his war in Ukraine has been stifled. Independent media have been crippled. His fiercest political foe, Alexei Navalny, died in an Arctic prison last month, and other critics are either in jail or in exile.
Beyond the fact that voters had virtually no choice, independent monitoring of the election was extremely limited. According to Russia’s Central Election Commission, Putin had some 87% of the vote with about 90% of precincts counted.
In that tightly controlled environment, Navalny’s associates urged those unhappy with Putin or the war in Ukraine to go to the polls at noon on Sunday — and lines outside several polling stations both inside Russia and at its embassies around the world appeared to swell at that time.
Among those heeding the call was Yulia Navalnaya, Navalny’s widow, who joined a long line in Berlin as some in the crowd applauded and chanted her name.
She spent more than five hours in the line and told reporters after casting her vote that she wrote her late husband’s name on the ballot.
Unusually, Putin referenced Navalny by name for the first time in years at the news conference. And he said he was informed of an idea to release the opposition leader from prison, days before his death. Putin said that he agreed to the idea, on condition that Navalny didn’t return to Russia.
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