“Voters from new regions vote for the first time in their historic homeland, with hearts full of emotion”, provides commentary on local television. The “new regions”, in the official lexicon, are the four Ukrainian regions annexed – only in part – to the Russian Federation: Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhia, Kherson. ” For safety reasons “the local elections on Sunday September 10 started early, sometimes as early as August 30.
Since then, rare images of this election have been received, sparingly taken up by federal television. As during the “connection referendum” organized in incredible conditions in September 2022, the vote in these territories is taking place in a black hole, close to the fighting, under the strict control of the Russian military and security services, and without even the slightest data on the real number of voters. voters.
This first is the only particularity of this election which is being held in 49 regions – or approximately half of the subjects of the Federation – at various levels, from the municipal council to the post of governor, for about twenty of them. The methods which have made it possible to increasingly increase control over the electoral process in recent years will once again be required: limiting the number of direct ballots; prohibition of participation of undesirable candidates; voting over three days without ballot box surveillance at night; exclusion of independent observers; use of administrative resource…
A handful of veteran candidates
Falsifications are facilitated this year by the generalization of electronic voting. In Moscow, in 2021, this method had made it possible to completely reverse the result obtained at the polls, which was not favorable to power. The election monitoring NGO Golos (also decapitated by a wave of arrests in mid-August) also notes that pressure on retirees and public sector employees has increased, and is now taking place openly.
The focus on holding elections in the occupied territories of Ukraine, where the primary goal is to establish pro-Russian authorities over the long term, masks a more complex reality. The war in which Russia has been plunged for eighteen months is totally absent from the ballot and from what takes the place of a campaign. Contrary to the strategy initially announced, the candidates for power hardly communicated on “heroism” soldiers engaged in Ukraine and the ” resistance “ of the country to the aggression it would suffer.
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