Voters in Russia will elect 450 members of the State Duma from September 18 to 20. Regional assembly and gubernatorial elections will also be held in the country’s regions, which span 11 time zones.
In addition to the ruling United Russia party, the Communist Party, the Liberal Democratic Party, A Just Russia, New People and Yabloko are among the prominent parties. Yabloko, the only one of these parties to follow an anti-war line, was barred from taking part in the State Duma party-list vote, although most of the programs of these parties are aligned with Kremlin policies.
United Russia set to retain its majority
United Russia, which currently holds 321 seats in the State Duma, is expected to emerge from the election with a majority. Nevertheless, the vote remains important for gauging political trends among the public.
The election process will also cover four partially occupied regions of Ukraine where Moscow claims to have annexed territory and fighting is continuing. The decision to spread voting over three days and allow electronic voting in 33 regions has drawn criticism because it could make it easier to manipulate the results.
Party and candidate pools are shrinking
Ora John Reuter, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, described Russia’s system as an “electoral authoritarian system.” Reuter said that although elections continue to be held, the conditions of competition are tightly controlled: candidates and parties cannot call for an end to the war or openly challenge Putin’s legitimacy. Limited debate remains possible on other policy issues.
Exiled political commentator Ekaterina Shulman said the deterioration of the political system was not solely a product of the recent period. Shulman argued that by 2011, the authorities had already shaped the composition of subsequent Dumas to a significant extent and had pushed other parties in parliament into a limited role of approving draft laws prepared by the executive bodies.
Vadim Ternovoy of the Election Atlas project said the number of legally registered political parties had fallen from 75 to 17 over the past decade. Ternovoy said that, for the first time since 2012, parties exempt from the requirement to collect voter signatures had been able to submit party lists for the State Duma elections.
To take part in an election, a party must be represented in the Duma or have won a seat in at least one regional assembly. Parties that do not meet these conditions must collect 200,000 voter signatures to appear on the ballot.
Ternovoy also said the number of people applying to run at all election levels had fallen by about 20 percent since 2022. This figure refers to those who applied to become candidates, rather than only candidates ultimately registered, and points to a decline in the willingness to participate in politics.
The history of restrictions and political pressure
The narrowing of Russia’s political and electoral system began in the mid-2000s. During this period, the Kremlin increased its control over the media and took steps against oligarchs with political influence. Direct elections for governors were abolished between 2004 and 2012. While the restriction remains in some regions, direct elections for mayors in regional capitals and major cities were also ended.
More recently, rules were introduced barring people designated as “foreign agents” from standing for office, while the operating space for independent election monitors was further restricted. Golos, an independent monitoring organization that had documented election violations since 2000, shut down last year after its co-chair was imprisoned.
Ternovoy said the restrictions had been developed in response to demands for greater political participation and accountability from the authorities. The 2018 attempt by Alexey Navalny to run for president and the mass protests against the exclusion of opposition candidates from the 2019 Moscow City Duma elections were also cited as significant developments in this process.
Yabloko and opposition candidates
Yabloko was removed from the State Duma party-list vote over allegations that it had used foreign funding, published campaign materials on restricted foreign platforms and violated copyright rules. The party rejected the accusations but continued to field candidates in single-member constituencies and regional assembly elections.
At least 36 opposition candidates were prevented from running in State Duma and regional assembly elections. More than half of the cases involved Yabloko candidates. Seventeen candidates were disqualified over online posts mentioning Navalny, while seven were disqualified for using links to Facebook and Instagram, which are banned in Russia, or the platforms’ logos.
Saratov politician Nikolay Bondarenko was removed from the race after being fined 1,000 rubles in 2024 for publishing a photograph of Navalny on a Telegram channel opened in his own name. Bondarenko denied any connection to the channel.
Boris Nadezhdin, whose anti-war presidential campaign in 2024 drew long lines of supporters, was also unable to run in the Duma elections as an independent candidate. Nadezhdin was barred from standing after being fined and briefly detained over “extremist” symbols in a photograph of Navalny and being designated a “foreign agent”; he left Russia in August.
Turnout and televised debates
Although televised debates are part of the official election campaign, Putin did not take part in any of them. Many United Russia candidates also did not appear in the debates. In Ryazan, state television ended a program after its introduction when it was unable to bring Duma candidates together in the studio for two consecutive days.
A poll published in June found that 66 percent of Russians did not know when the State Duma elections would be held. Twenty-eight percent of respondents said they did not intend to vote. Of that group, 41 percent said their vote would not make a difference, while 24 percent said they believed the elections would not be fair.
Ternovoy said Yabloko’s initial registration for the election had mobilized part of the anti-war electorate despite the absence of a well-known party leader. Interest in Yabloko on social media increased 80-fold after the party was removed from the Duma party-list vote.
According to Ternovoy, if Yabloko had remained on the ballot, the party would have gained free airtime on the country’s largest television and radio channels starting at the end of August. Ternovoy said this could have influenced public opinion and added that the Election Atlas’s social media monitoring showed that people were more interested in restrictions on political competition than in the activities of Putin and other officials.
