Communist Party candidate Nikolay Kharitonov is the runner-up with 4.32%
Ria Novosti reports: the total turnout, according to the data at 20:37 was 74.22%
Putin’s preliminary result is a record in the history of modern Russia. In 2018, he gained 76.69% in the presidential elections, in 2012, 63.6%. Dmitry Medvedev won in 2008 with the result of 70.28%. In 2004 and 2000, Putin was in the lead from 71.31% and 52.9%, respectively. In 1996 Boris Yeltsin won [rigged with help of US] the second round with the result of 53.82%.
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I’ve heard many people say they’ll vote Putin till he’s gone and then vote KPRF. Rally around the flag effect seems huge at the moment. Still there was one good aspect that stood out to me:
Communists delivered 26 million copies of their program across the country (for the first time not skipping a single subject) which the other candidates severely lacked, a win regardless of the electoral result.
https://kprf.ru/activity/elections/225109.html
Machine translation of Kharitonov’s belief in its immediate implementation:
“Our program will make its way literally from tomorrow. In all regions, in all territories, it was received favorably, and people hope for its implementation. And we will implement it directly,” Kharitonov noted at a briefing on Sunday evening.
In his opinion, the current head of state, Vladimir Putin, has taken on enormous responsibility.
“If he wins, one can only wish for one thing: to justify the trust of his voters,” he emphasized, Rossiyskaya Gazeta reports.
Let us remind you that Putin is in the lead with 87.26% in the presidential elections based on the results of processing 60% of the protocols. Second place goes to Kharitonov, who received 4.18% of the votes.
I’ve heard many people say they’ll vote Putin till he’s gone and then vote KPRF
This makes a lot of sense to me and explains the temporary bleed off of support from KPRF to Putin especially for this presidential election. A lot of Russian communists are very patriotic and with a “rally around the flag” effect i can imagine them deciding to support the president in wartime even if they would otherwise have voted KPRF instead. This is not easy for most western communists to understand since we have a very different relationship to our own countries and leaders.
We always have to remember that it is Putin who most Russians see as having led the country out of the horrific situation they were in at the end of the 1990s, massively restoring the economy, standard of living, and the strength and international standing of Russia. They view him as having given them back their dignity. This is limited to Putin himself though and does not translate to other politicians in his party, so once he has left the scene we will see great opportunities for big changes, for good or for bad.
That is also why the West is so desperate to get Putin out because they hope that in the struggle that will inevitably follow him leaving power the way will be opened for the kind of changes they want to see (either bring Russia back to its knees and re-colonize it as in the 90s or “finish the job” and completely dismantle it). Communists must be aware that this is being prepared and themselves prepare, build up their strength and be ready to seize that opportunity to steer Russia once that time comes in the opposite direction instead, the direction of socialism.
But i have to stress here the importance of timely preparation. The West never rests and is always plotting and preparing the ground for their color revolution attempts years and years in advance spending millions and millions of dollars building up their subversion and propaganda networks. We communists must also never rest and never stop organizing, agitating, educating and building a mass working class movement, whether it is in Russia or wherever else we live.
It’s a disappointing result and the KPRF needs to do some serious thinking about how to stand out more as a real alternative to United Russia, because it is clear they have underperformed compared to previous elections. However i also think that this is an exceptional election what with the war situation and once things calm down a little and there is no longer a feeling of needing to unite against an external threat some of their voter base which temporarily went over to UR will come back. Still, they have a lot of work ahead of them if they are serious about building up a mass working class organization again.
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The 3.8% is some irrelevant lib that hardly anyone had even heard of before this election and who will fade again into irrelevancy just as quickly. He was just a placeholder to aggregate all of the disaffected libs behind. At least Kharitonov and Slutsky are somewhat known names, even if the latter is a total shit bag.
Anyway, i think this election isn’t really representative of the support that the KPRF actually has, as i said these were unusual circumstances what with the conflict sparking a patriotic wave and people wanting to show support for the commander in chief or at the very least keep the country stable until the war is won.
Imo regional elections in non-presidential election years are more indicative of the actual level of support that each party enjoys. And in those the KPRF tends to do quite well actually. Clearly Putin is incredibly popular, but that is not always the case for his party as a whole and other candidates that they run in lower level elections do lose to communists sometimes.
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KPRF needs younger leadership imo. Particularly younger people who weren’t yet politically conscious in the 90s and who haven’t been so traumatized by the political defeats suffered by communists during that time. I believe there is a kind of collective political PTSD among communists who were active in that difficult period that makes them very timid and prone to compromise and capitulation.
(Don’t quote me on that though, it’s just some armchair psychology on my part and may be total bullshit. In fact i know there are older communists in Russia who are quite radical, if somewhat behind the times in many ways…)
I agree with your views, I had the same experiences with older communists. Also hoping that the younger gen can turn things around
For comparison, here are the results of the previous election:
My initial thoughts: this is an impressive result if not exactly what we communists would prefer, but it was to be expected that Putin would win, and do so convincingly with even more votes than he got in any previous elections due to the “rally around the flag” effect during a war and things generally going very well for Russia at the moment, both domestically in terms of the economy and geopolitically.
For us as communists we can at least be glad that the Communist Party came in second again, though we would much prefer to see a result like that of 2018 (or better) where the lead over the third place is more convincing. Still it is more than what communist parties get in almost any western country, and at an unusually high voter turnout of around 75% this still means that between 3 and 4 million people voted for communists.
Putin was never going to be defeated but this shows that communists in Russia need to step up their game if they want to continue to have political leverage to use in advancing working class interests. Putin will most likely leave the political scene come the end of this next six year term he just won, and it is necessary that by then the communists will have built up their strength, organizing and winning the trust of the people by fighting for their interests.
Participating in bourgeois electoralism is of course not the most productive avenue for communists to advance our goals but as Lenin explained it should also not be entirely excluded as a method of struggle in the right circumstances. The situation in Russia is currently one in which i believe those circumstances exist, unlike in the West where this is generally a rather pointless endeavor at the moment and our efforts are better spent elsewhere.
That Pavel Grudinin guy sure looks a lot like reincarnated Stalin.
If only…
Maduro congratulates Putin on his presidential election victory, Venezuela’s Foreign Ministry says
The Iranian President, Ibrahim Raeesi, has congratulated Vladimir Putin on winning the Russian election
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