Paul
Goble
Staunton, March 17 – Tomorrow,
Russians will go to vote after what Yekaterinburg commentator Aleksey Shaburov
says has been “one of the strangest Russian presidential campaigns” ever, a
campaign that was about mobilization rather than choice, suppression of
differences of opinion rather than their clarification, and a failure to talk
about the future.
The Yekaterinburg commentator says
that even before the results are tabulated, there were three features of these
elections that defined them and their likely impact on Russia’s future,
features perhaps never entirely absent in earlier campaigns but that have
defined the one just concluded (politsovet.ru/58332-vybory-2018-chto-eto-bylo.html).
First, from day one it was clear to
everyone that Vladimir Putin would win if he wanted to. What mattered was not
that outcome but rather the level of participation because this election was
all about the ability of the regime to mobilize the population, something
measured by participation rather than by the share of votes cast for this or
that candidate.
That was shown by the enormous and
striking difference between the amount of money and effort the authorities
devoted to getting people to turn out to vote as compared to that devoted to
getting them to vote for Putin. “Was participation really more important for
the authorities than the results? Of course not.”
But the goal of the campaign was
mobilization because that provides a measure of the capacity of the Putin
regime not just to get people to come to the polls but its ability to get them
to act. This “transformation of the elections
into a mobilization campaign is not a good signal because it deprives elections
of their proper function and makes other things possible.
Second, elections are supposed to be
the occasion for contesting points of view, for challenging the positions of
those in power by those outside. But the campaign just concluded almost
completely eliminated that possibility for within system protests that could
help both the incumbents and the opposition know better where the population is
and how to proceed.
“All the concerns that the elections
would lead to a growth in protest attitudes and to the exacerbation of
contradictions in society turned out to be for naught,” Shaburov says. One need
not restrict this to political protests but rather to enlarge it social ones
because there are many social problems in Russia that should have given rise to
protest. That didn’t happen.
“The only significant protests during
this time were connected with ecology,” with concerns about trash disposal. “But
ecological protest by definition is local and therefore it is not appropriate
to talk about its national dimensions.” A
major reason for the absence of protests is the opposition candidates did not
encourage them lest they be accused of “’rocking the boat.’”
Even Aleksey Navalny, who wasn’t
allowed to be a candidate, did not make use of his efforts to stimulate protest
attitudes. He focused instead on
promoting a boycott, that is, on demobilizing the population rather than
mobilizing it against the authorities, according to Shaburov.
If this absence of protests was very useful
for the authorities, the commentator says, “it was not for society. Elections
are the best means of talking about all-national problems, finding ways for
their resolution or at least raising them at the level of the entire country.
But nothing like that happened;” and it is difficult to foresee when it will.
And third, this election produced no
model for the future even though many had expected Putin to declare his
intentions. But he did not. “Moreoveer,
Putin didn’t even present his own pre-election program.” Putin himself became the image of the future,
not any specific policies. In that sense, the campaign reinforced the notion
that “if there is Putin, there is Russia.”
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