LETTER FROM MOSCOW
This day in November 2023, in the Kremlin, Ella Pamfilova may have let herself be carried away by emotion. The president of the Russian Central Electoral Commission (CEC) speaks in front of her hero, Vladimir Putin, who has just awarded her the medal “for services rendered to the fatherland”. She enthuses: “We have one of the most modern electoral systems in place. The most open and the most transparent, even… I don’t see any equivalent in the world. »
Ella Pamfilova has a certain sense of emphasis. Moreover, the upcoming presidential election, from March 15 to 17, over which she has control, is nothing other than a “historical event, on which depends not only the destiny of Russia, but also that of the world”. Those who dare to speak of fraud are sometimes “provocative”, sometimes “hysterical anti-Russians”, when they are not simply ” next to nothing “ or some “crazy”, according to the expressions used in different interviews.
Ella Pamfilova has been at the head of the CEC since 2016. Theoretically, it is a shadowy, technical job: operating nearly a hundred thousand polling stations over an immense territory, thanks to a bloated administration. But the former union leader likes the light, even at 70. She does not hesitate to distill short shocking sentences that please the media, even if it means replaying the same sketch several times.
At the end of 2017, when she refused Alexei Navalny the right to run in the presidential election, Ella Pamfilova mockingly told the opponent: “You are young, your future is ahead of you. » She liked the formula so much that she reused it six years later, after having excluded from the 2024 edition two candidates opposed to the war in Ukraine. “You are a young woman, your future is still ahead of you”, she said to Ekaterina Duntsova; “You have good political prospects,” she also said to Boris Nadejdine, 60 years old… Each time, the pretext used is the same: “errors” in the application files.
A respected human rights defender
There is a mystery in the career of Ella Pamfilova. Before being a devoted soldier of the Putin regime, this woman with a perpetually tired smile was a respected human rights defender and even, for a time, an opponent of Vladimir Putin. Born in Uzbekistan, she was an apparatchik in the declining Soviet Union in the late 1980s – a union leader at the Moscow energy giant Mosenergo, then a deputy in the Supreme Soviet.
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