Faced with those who would dream of it being weak or disunited, Russia displays a united front, monolithic to the point of caricature. In addition to the personal plebiscite granted to Vladimir Putin, who sees himself returned to power for a new six-year term, this is the message sent by the result of the presidential election concluded on Sunday evening March 17, after three days voting. The non-final figures attribute the exceptionally high score of 87% of the votes to the outgoing president, 71 years old, whom television renamed as “national leader”, Sunday night. Participation is announced at 74.22%.
With this result, Vladimir Putin surpasses his previous record from 2018 (76%) – and moves from the category of results “Belarusian style” to those practiced in the baroque Turkmen dictatorship. Another record: barring an accident, at the end of this mandate, in 2030, Mr. Putin will have surpassed Joseph Stalin’s record for longevity in the Kremlin.
The election had been planned to coincide with the tenth anniversary of “attachment” from Crimea to Russia, the great work of Vladimir Putin’s first quarter century in power. It was finally overtaken by the war: the three days of elections coincided with bombings and armed incursions in the southern regions of the country, deep drone attacks and incidents visibly controlled from the outside in a few offices voting.
Here again, the results are displayed as proof of Moscow’s determination. Mr. Putin is credited with 96.45% of the votes in Belgorod, the region most affected by the fighting, or with 95% and 92% in those of Donetsk and Zaporizhia, occupied by the Russian army. However, there is no question of suggesting any regional differences. Chechnya attributes 99.3% to the head of the Kremlin, and even Moscow, known to be a hotbed of protest, showed 88.8% on Sunday evening, after counting 70% of the ballots.
This climate of heightened tensions has probably reinforced the real support Mr. Putin enjoys from a significant part of the population. This is even the genius of the Kremlin propagandists: having succeeded in transforming the invasion of Ukraine into Western aggression, and a war of conquest into an existential fight for the “traditional values” or the “sovereignty” of Russia.
The war in the minds
On Sunday evening, during an impromptu press conference at his headquarters, Mr. Putin himself attributed the good participation figures to the fact that “Russia defends its right to develop with arms in hand”. After thanking the voters and estimating that “we are all on the same team”he devoted most of this intervention to geopolitical questions, evoking both the possibility of a world war, that of an annexation of the Ukrainian region of Kharkiv and – vaguely – the proposal for an Olympic truce formulated by the French President, Emmanuel Macron.
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