Russia will hold regular regional and local elections on September 12-14 . The “single day of voting” – admittedly, the name is a little confusing given that since 2020 elections in many regions have been held over two or three days – has, over the years, become the start of Russia’s fall political season: a time for governors to demonstrate that they are controlling their regions; for political managers to market their skills; and for decision-makers to make potentially unpopular announcements after the votes. It would be foolish to analyze these votes as “real” elections, but they are nonetheless important even under the circumstances of Russia’s hard authoritarianism.
Demobilization and fading pluralism
This year, gubernatorial elections are held in 19 regions (plus the occupied Sevastopol), regional legislative elections in 11 regions, local council elections in 25 cities and various local votes across the country, although of these Russia is going to hold significantly fewer in the future. The number of free-standing municipalities has dwindled by more than 17% between 2022 and 2025 and as a result of a recently adopted federal reform, this process will accelerate. Novaya Gazeta estimated that up to 150,000 positions in various local councils could be eliminated as the result of the federal law and the various regional municipal reforms inspired by it that have taken place over the past years. One can also tell this by the falling number of ruling party candidates.
Looking at just the number of gubernatorial candidates, the demotion of the Communist Party (KPRF) – the most likely catch-all opposition party an electoral cycle ago – is clear. The party was allowed to field gubernatorial candidates in 17 regions only, behind United Russia (19) and the Liberal Democratic Party (18), albeit this required the effective disqualification of communist candidates in two regions – Leningrad and Komi – that are problematic for the Kremlin (in both regions this was done by using United Russia’s dominance in municipal council to deny the communist candidates the needed number of supporting signatures. The party was complaining about pressure from the security services in other regions too. In the Irkutsk Region – another problematic area for the Kremlin due to residents’ dismay over rising electricity prices, United Russia infighting, and where the local branch of the KPRF has traditionally had strong positions – the authorities did allow Sergey Levchenko, a former governor, to run against the incumbent Igor Kobzev, but Levchenko’s campaign has been pretty muted. The “Fair Russia” party is kept on life support through Chuvashia’s governor, Oleg Nikolayev – this is the one region where United Russia does not have its own candidate – but the party was also forced to withdraw its support from one of its more popular candidates, Alexandra Novikova, a former television anchor, who was going to run against the unpopular governor of the earthquake-ridden Kamchatka Territory.
War participants: a brand, but not a force
The number of war participants among candidates has undoubtedly grown since last year’s elections. This however does not mean that there are particularly many of them nor that they are going to be elected into positions of real power. United Russia officially selected 951 war participants to stand as candidates in various elections, which however is a mere 2 percent of the people standing for office as ruling party candidates in various votes. The vast majority (1,052) of the 1,397 candidates across parties, brandishing a “special military operation (SVO) veteran” marker, will run for essentially powerless municipal offices. The 339 candidates running for regional and city assemblies make up 2-3 percent of candidates for these positions. Of the two gubernatorial candidates with a war participant badge, Stepan Solovyov is a serial designated also-ran for the “Green Alternative” party, this time in the Republic of Komi (his battlefield activities are shrouded in mystery); while Yevgeny Pervyshov, the acting governor of the Tambov Region belongs to the class of “SVO veterans” with prior experience in public administration (he was the mayor of Krasnodar) and whom the Kremlin therefore trusts with some actual power, unlike most other war participants who can, at best, hope to be appointed to unelected positions overseeing their local governments’ communication with other veterans. Pervyshov has more in common with figures such as acting Orenburg governor Yevgeny Solntsev – a career public servant who used his status as a former occupation official in Donetsk as a career elevator – than with most war participants.
These caveats, of course, do not stop the authorities from touting these candidates as an example of the inclusion of war participants into the echelons of power, an attempt to signal to the wider population that the authorities will care about returnees. One consequence of this is that war participants are undoubtedly becoming more visible as a political brand, but not yet as a political class or a political force.
The war and technological limits are unlikely to cause disruptions
Even beyond the war participants running (and appointed after the votes) it will be interesting to see the war’s effects on the Kremlin’s voting machine, albeit it is unlikely that any circumstance will significantly impact the “electoral events” (to borrow this evocative example of Russian political newspeak from Yekaterina Schulmann who often highlights it). Drone attacks may cause disruptions in border regions such as Kursk and Bryansk or the occupied Sevastopol, but the authorities are determined to turn out the numbers even in these territories, so tested methods such as “voting on tree stumps” (the colloquial name for makeshift, irregular “polling stations” widely used during the 2020 constitutional referendum) or increasing the number of people registered to vote from home will be used. The authorities are also promoting online voting – which, due to its obscurity, and to Russia’s poor data security practices, arguably allows the authorities to deploy traditional methods of coercion and rigging in a less costly manner – and have highlighted that an increasing number of voters are registered to vote online. But these efforts are limited by regular mobile internet outages in a number of Russian regions since Ukraine’s successful “Operation Spiderweb”, which relied on mobile signal. But time-tested “offline” methods, such as the coercion or incentivization of public officials and employees of state-owned companies to vote the right way, are still available, as stories from Magadan, Orenburg, Sverdlovsk and other regions show.
These technological and perhaps, in some regions, financial limits to electoral engineering are however unlikely to cause much worry, as regional and local politics have also become less pluralistic over the past years. The past five-year electoral cycle has coincided with the carrying out of a multi-stage reform of public administration, which further solidified a top-down power vertical, first (in 2021) between the federal government and regional governments and later (in 2022-25) between regional governments and municipalities. Over the past years this has led to a growing lack of interest in standing for office in regional and local votes, as the potential benefits of these positions are now lower, while the risks associated with them are significantly higher than just a couple of years ago. This is also reflected in how much money candidates are able to spend on their campaigns: even official figures show that the 20 incumbent governors this year are spending more funds than all other candidates together (some of this money is essentially obtained from state-owned companies through elaborate schemes), not to mention the advantages they have from the so-called administrative resources at their disposal. Also crucially, with the recent shutdown of the independent election monitoring network Golos, following the jailing of one of its founders, there is currently no reliable country-wide network of election observers (albeit smaller projects with a local and regional focus exist), which makes it much easier to hide manipulation. It seems almost superfluous that even with such advantages, AI-generated campaign material is increasingly flooding the Russian internet.
Consequences of the hardening vertical
Another consequence of the hardening of the vertical is that governors appointed mid-term have had a freer hand to make personnel changes, including in municipalities. Just a couple of years ago, it was customary for newly appointed governors to tread carefully in the months between their appointment and the election that was to confirm their position and where their performance relied, to a significant extent, on whether local elites and officials helped to turn out the vote. Some of the governors appointed over the past year – who will have to be confirmed in next week’s votes – have moved much faster. Denis Pasler, the newly appointed governor of the Sverdlovsk Region (and a native of the region) instantly moved over his team from Orenburg, the region that he had led prior to his appointment.
In Komi, Rostislav Goldshtein did not only change the heads of several major cities prior to the election, but also pushed for a change in the electoral law, which will likely further increase the ruling party’s weight in the region’s municipal councils. This is significant because Komi is one of the rare regions where political life has been relatively turbulent and pluralistic and where the leading local “systemic opposition” party – the local branch of the Communist Party – has successfully harnessed some anti-government sentiment. The party’s more visible faces were neutralized: former regional deputy Viktor Vorobyov was declared a “foreign agent” (and thus unable to stand), while its local leader, Oleg Mikhailov was not allowed to run in this year’s election – but there is still a chance that the communists could bounce back in local and legislative votes, embarrassing the newly appointed governor.
In general, the Kremlin will likely watch the performances of Pasler and Goldshtein closely not only because of the (from their point of view) problematic political history of the regions, but also because their appointment was some of the latest in the series of governors with local roots but a substantial career in federally determined positions, being appointed to head regions, a cautious semi-reversal of the previous trend that gave preference complete outsiders. In the past three years there were seven such gubernatorial appointments. These appointees have however mostly worked in relatively unproblematic regions (and had close federal overseers); an obvious exception, former Kursk governor Alexey Smirnov, spent a mere six months in his position before being removed and indicted for corruption related to the region’s defensive structures.
A final blow to the late Navalny, but not the issues that powered his movement
Lastly and importantly, this year’s votes will also see United Russia bury some of the last significant electoral results of the late Alexey Navalny’s countrywide campaign in the late 2010s. In Tomsk and Novosibirsk, two major Siberian cities where an alliance of local opposition candidates and Navalny’s offices managed to bring down ruling party majorities in city councils in 2020 – which in turn led to all sorts of inconveniences for Kremlin-appointed political managers – United Russia will likely retake a decisive majority. A similar result is expected in Tambov where the ruling party also lost its majority in 2020. However, it should be noted that the second stage of the Kremlin’s public administration reform further diminishes the importance of these local councils by essentially allowing governors to handpick mayoral candidates (“competition committees”, while a far cry from direct elections, have still allowed local elites a degree of control) and dismiss them more or less at will.
In general, the municipal reform is continuing to cause simmering disagreement. In several Siberian and Far Eastern regions councilmembers and citizens are resisting the authorities’ attempts to disband village councils and are contesting regional municipal reforms at court and public hearings. While these attempts are unlikely to be successful, the fact that activists are trying to exhaust every potential way of appeals – similarly to how it happened with environmentalist protests – suggests that citizens understand the stakes.
Perhaps the most important takeaway from this year’s regional and local elections is exactly this: while the federal government has extended significant efforts over the past years to monitor local political and social issues more effectively, these are usually seen as problems for political technologists, and not for politicians to solve. Even where officials signal that they are aware that these issues exist (e.g. in Komi, Novosibirsk and Irkutsk) and talk about it, between the increasingly tight budgets of regions and municipalities and the federal government’s prioritization of performance indicators that most regional and local leaders either have little influence over (e.g. birth rates) or no real budget to solve (e.g. the integration of returning war participants), there is little that they are able or motivated to do about it. The usual pre-election visits of federal officials to regions to announce additional transfers or talk up local development projects can remind citizens what “the expected way” to vote is, but the real risk for the Kremlin is not that governors score below the ruling party’s designated benchmarks; it is that systemic issues remain unresolved and increasingly unresolvable through politics.