Russia’s elections may be repressive and predictable, but that does not make them politically meaningless. Although the country has transitioned to a personalist dictatorship under a de facto wartime state of emergency, its political system has never shed its formally representative constitutional structures. Despite the high centralisation of power in the Kremlin, the growing repressiveness of the security services, and the regime’s broad retreat from popular responsiveness, Russia continues to hold multiparty elections. But while the outcome is set, stage-managing it effectively appears much more challenging for the Kremlin this time around.

The upcoming Duma election, scheduled for 18-20 September, has already deviated from the standard script. These electoral events are sometimes dull affairs, such as Vladimir Putin’s plebiscitary re-election in 2024 or the 2021 vote that produced a duly compliant parliament a year before the onset of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. But today the ruling party is as unpopular as it has been in four years. More importantly, its weaking base of support comes amid macroeconomic stagnation, a demoralising Ukrainian strike campaign, and a sense that the war is no closer to a conclusion.

This is reflected in growing social anxiety within Russia. New polling suggests that nearly 60 percent of Russians view the political situation as “tense”. Notably, political curators in the Kremlin seem to be taking this data more seriously than in previous elections, going so far as to publicise warnings to ruling party candidates about the “tough questions” they are likely to face on the campaign trail. At the same time, we should not expect a rerun of Russia’s most troublesome experience of 2011, which nearly led to an opposition victory in parliament. Yet all the available evidence suggests that political managers in the presidential administration and across the wider Russian elite remain unusually nervous about ensuring acceptable electoral outcomes this time. The reasons for this uncertainty are apparent to political analysts both in Russia and in the West.

More than four years into a grinding war of attrition, Russia has sustained massive casualties, while citizens face disruptions to everyday life from Ukrainian strikes against energy and industrial targets. Despite overall passivity, there are now visible signs that Russian society is increasingly disillusioned with the governance choices of its gerontocratic elite under Putin’s ageing rule.

These political headwinds have produced low polling figures for the regime’s ruling party, United Russia, as well as unusually frank statements by regime-affiliated political technologists preparing the political leadership for reduced support in the upcoming election. Reports suggest that the Kremlin’s political technologists and managers responsible for coordinating acceptable voting results have lowered their expected “key performance indicators” for the ruling party from 60 percent to as low as 45 percent. While no one predicts that United Russia will be denied a majority, managing the political space has become far more difficult than in the past.

The Kremlin’s efforts have largely been directed at disrupting voters’ ability to express dissatisfaction with the country’s direction through its existing political institutions. In early August, the previously prominent liberal opposition party Yabloko was unceremoniously removed from the ballot amid signs that it might become a focal point for anti-war votes and further complicate what the regime considers acceptable parliamentary arithmetic by adding an unreliable party to the Duma. Other parties, most notably the legacy Communist Party (KPRF), have faced persistent interference to ensure they cannot do the same.

The Duma matters more than you think

While such techniques are not unusual, they still suggest that Russia’s political curators are aware of societal disappointment pervading important parts of the country. These Duma elections therefore also serve as a test of the regime’s ability to manage and adapt to mounting economic and societal frustration. Although the Russian parliament is not at the centre of the country’s authoritarian political order, it is far from the nonentity that its “rubber stamp” reputation sometimes implies.

Political scientists assign a variety of roles to parliamentary institutions under authoritarian conditions in general, and in Russia in particular. For some, they provide a means of gathering information about society: elections, even when partially fraudulent or systematically constrained, can still produce seat outcomes that inform the executive about both the ability of its subordinates to mobilise loyalists (especially regional governors) and changes in underlying social trends. For others, elections and the parliaments they produce are critical mechanisms for coordinating and co-opting lower-tier regime elites by providing rents and other rewards for good service. Still others note that parliaments, through their lawmaking and deliberative committee functions, remain a key venue for parts of the ministerial bureaucracy to fight turf wars and adjudicate policy disputes, even when these are removed from public view.

The Duma also serves as a bureaucratic and legislative conveyor belt that can either fast-track or slow contentious policies as consensus forms elsewhere in the regime. It has been highly active, even under repressive wartime conditions, and is deeply involved in structuring the evolving legal regime and distributive politics of Russia’s wartime economy, as well as fraught questions surrounding military mobilisation.

Finally, the Duma acts as the institutional fiefdom of its speaker, Vyacheslav Volodin, who remains a member of Russia’s upper-tier decision-making elite by virtue of his firm control over the plenary. By ensuring regime control over a major constitutional organ in Russia’s formal institutional ecosystem, Volodin retains influence over legislative processes and a seat at the table in higher-order venues, including both the State and Security Councils. Both bodies have direct access to Putin and may play an important role in any future succession.

Expected and disruptive outcomes

If everything goes according to plan, the elections should produce a comfortable majority for United Russia, with varying degrees of opposition party representation. All such opposition parties would be largely co-opted – or “systemic” in Russian terminology. The result would broadly resemble the current Duma, maintaining legislative continuity. However, if societal discontent does find expression in counted votes, the ruling party could lose its current constitutional majority. Such an outcome would require the ruling party to seek systemic opposition support to pass future constitutional amendments and give other parties greater representation on committees where substantive legislative work still takes place.

A bad election outcome could undermine Volodin’s claim to continued access to higher politics, potentially setting off a fight over a new speaker who would, in turn, become the latest entrant into the ageing upper-tier elite on which Putin relies to ensure his decisions are implemented. Such an outcome could trigger a chain of resignations and dismissals elsewhere in the Duma apparatus or its committees, in the domestic politics bloc of the presidential administration, and potentially elsewhere, forcing fresh blood into the formal political system, albeit at the cost of immediate instability and potential public factionalism.

Russia’s parliamentary history under Putin can be characterised in three periods: consolidation and quiescence (2003–11), disruption and unruly activity (2011–16), and reconsolidation and tight internal coordination (2016–26). Successful manipulation in the upcoming September elections may allow this last era of firm political control to continue into the late 2020s. But if societal discontent translates, even partially, into more seats for the nominal opposition, that may no longer be possible. What that means remains unclear for now. As long as regular elections remain part of Russia’s constitutional architecture, they will retain the potential to disrupt the underlying institutional status quo.

The delayed generational turnover within Russia’s ruling elite means that even limited institutional change could shape the contours of future politics. Any deviation from the Kremlin’s desired result could therefore have wider consequences for elite politics. The election may simply allow the regime to kick the can down the road once more. But analysts should not mistake a managed result for a politically meaningless one: authoritarian politics can still produce unexpected consequences.

The European Leadership Network itself as an institution holds no formal policy positions. The opinions articulated above represent the views of the authors rather than the European Leadership Network or its members. The ELN aims to encourage debates that will help develop Europe’s capacity to address the pressing foreign, defence, and security policy challenges of our time, to further its charitable purposes.

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