Communist Party of the Russian Federation and the Liberal Democratic Party will take part in the elections of 2024

Parliamentary parties began working on a strategy for the presidential elections to be held a year later, on March 17, 2024. Sergei Mironov, the head of A Just Russia, was the first to decide: on February 22, he announced on Rossiya 24 that the party would skip the campaign for the second time in a row and support Vladimir Putin (he has not yet announced his intention to run).

According to Mironov, the decision will be formalized at the congress on May 20: “I will propose to my comrades not to nominate a candidate from our party, but to support the incumbent president.” He justified the decision as follows: “I think that this will be the most correct patriotic decision. Nothing to play the fool. We have a leader, a true patriot of the country, who today is fighting not only for the future of our Motherland, but also for the future of all mankind.”

True, no candidate under the current law can participate in the elections alone, and during the 2018 campaign, Putin had five opponents at once. Voting, recalls lawyer Oleg Zakharov, should be postponed if there is only one candidate left on the ballot (and refusal candidates who dropped out of the race without good reason may be charged with budget expenses for holding elections). At the same time, even the withdrawal of candidates from the race only postpones the date of the elections, Zakharov notes.

But it is already clear that candidates from at least two of the five parliamentary parties, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation and the Liberal Democratic Party, will take part in the 2024 campaign. The Communists have never missed a presidential election in 30 years, but twice, in 2004 and 2018. – Nominated as a candidate not party leader Gennady Zyuganov, but first agrarian deputy Nikolai Kharitonov, then a non-party entrepreneur, general director of the State Farm. Lenin Pavel Grudinin.

According to Vedomosti’s interlocutor close to the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, it is being discussed that Zyuganov himself, his first deputy Yuri Afonin (responsible for personnel), may go to the polls, and the extreme option is not ruled out – refusal to participate in the campaign to “demonstrate unity”. However, the Communist Party does not believe in the latter scenario. As explained by the press secretary of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation Alexander Yushchenko, the party will participate in the campaign and will announce a candidate at the end of the year. The nomination of Grudinin, for example, became known only at a meeting of the Presidium of the Central Committee on the eve of the last election congress in December 2017.

The LDPR has already begun preparations for the nomination of a specific candidate for the presidency – the new party leader Leonid Slutsky. This was told to Vedomosti by three interlocutors in the Liberal Democratic Party and confirmed by a source close to the presidential administration.

In February, according to sources in the Liberal Democratic Party, a team of external political technologists began working with Slutsky, including Alexei Chadaev and Sergei Malakhov (worked with governors, in elections at all levels, and the last known project was the New People party of Alexei Nechaev). At the same time, their primary task, according to interlocutors in the party, is not related to the inner-party affairs of the LDPR itself – it is connected with the formation of the party’s strategy for participating in the presidential campaign.

Oleksandr Nemtsev, associate professor at the Financial University, notes that both the list of candidates and the campaign agenda will be determined by the special military operation in Ukraine: “This is the main agenda of the upcoming campaign, which will be strengthened throughout the year, including through the need to make decisions in the field of economic issues “. It is possible that the campaign of the candidates of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation and the Liberal Democratic Party will be aimed at working with the “patriotic electorate”, which is skeptical about the actions of the authorities against the backdrop of a special military operation and is prone to self-organization, notes one of Vedomosti’s sources close to Staraya Ploshchad.

Another Vedomosti source believes that it is too early to talk about the final configuration of the ballot, since it is now impossible to calculate all the risks – for example, one of the difficulties of the 2018 elections was due to the fact that Grudinin began to claim the electorate of the main candidate already during the course of the campaign . Therefore, in the upcoming elections, the main question is who is the voter of the nominated candidates, says Pavel Sklyanchuk, a member of the political technologies committee of the Russian Association for Public Relations: “There is a feeling that the Communist Party of the Russian Federation and the Liberal Democratic Party will fight for radical patriots.”

Therefore, the ballot is unlikely to include representatives of the “military elite” – for example, the heroes of a special military operation, all of them will become proxies of the main candidate, Nemtsev notes. But in the list of candidates, if the dramaturgy of the campaign suddenly requires it, people with a different agenda, who are mildly disposed towards the special military operation, may also appear, he believes: “New faces from among the business community. Such patriotic entrepreneurs, but with their own opinion about the economic model of the country. I think such a candidate can come from the New People party.

Nechaev himself told Vedomosti that now the party is focusing on preparing for the autumn elections, where there will be many interesting and competitive campaigns. And based on their results, they will determine the format of participation in the presidential campaign in 2024.

As sociologist Denis Volkov notes, the electorate of the three parties – the Liberal Democratic Party, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation and A Just Russia – makes up about a quarter of the population, but other rules apply in the presidential elections, since this will be a vote based on the principle of trust-distrust to Putin and there will be no real struggle. “The patriotic electorate is now accumulating Putin. The Communist Party of the Russian Federation and the Liberal Democratic Party can claim to accumulate a protest electorate, primarily in socially disadvantaged sections of the population,” says Volkov.

The head of the Civil Society Development Fund, Konstantin Kostin, believes that at the moment the picture of the upcoming 2024 campaign is predictable: “If we project the current ratings, the picture is as follows: 75-80% will be “Putin’s majority,” a supra-party coalition of the president’s supporters. With her choice [в 2024 г.] everything is more or less clear. Among those who want to vote for other candidates, 13-15% are supporters of the left ideology, who are most likely to be taken away by the communists, and 5-8% are conditional systemic liberals or patriotic liberals.

In general, the elections will be held “according to the referendum scenario”, and the nuances will depend on “the rhetoric and the number of potential participants from the left and right,” Kostin said. “The configuration of the 2024 ballot will, of course, be adjusted following the results of a single voting day in 2023, but taking into account the obvious “rallying around the flag” following the results of the 2022 elections, where the party in power demonstrated a landslide victory even in problem regions (Vladivostok), and somewhere complete dominance (Tver),” says Zakharov.

But taking into account the increased requirements for legitimacy, it is unlikely that it will be decided to “clean up the ballot” to the level of “patriotic distillate,” Zakharov believes: “More likely, for opposition parties, participation in the presidential campaign carries the risk of demonstrating small numbers in the final protocol. This may be the root cause of their refusal to participate in them – in order not to fall into the dirt on the face of the electoral plan on the eve of the next elections to the State Duma, which are much more practically significant for them.”

Anna Narayeva participated in the preparation of the article