Putin Has Made The People’s Choice: What the State Duma campaign reveals about the Kremlin’s intentions
The 2026 State Duma elections are taking place against a backdrop of a deteriorating economic situation, growing war fatigue and deepening frustration amongst the public. However, a close analysis of the campaign’s progress and the tools of authoritarian control being employed by the authorities suggests that the Kremlin’s political objectives for the upcoming vote have shifted in the final stages.
Whilst the initial campaign plan envisaged a ‘therapeutic’, conciliatory atmosphere and an emphasis on the legitimacy of the elections, since August the focus has shifted towards coercive instruments of control and a tightening of restrictions on electoral eligibility, while the dominant narrative has become increasingly mobilising. In Putin’s recent speeches, the theme of war and victory as a common cause uniting the front lines and the home front has supplanted the themes of ‘sustainable development’ that had framed his earlier addresses during his pre-election tour of Russia.
The real institutional innovation in the current campaign has been the introduction of a second filter for candidates seeking admission to the elections. In August and the first half of September, a large-scale purge of already registered parties and candidates took place: courts annulled the registrations of federal and regional lists, as well as those of dozens of single-member constituency candidates, while party leaderships themselves removed already registered candidates from their lists. The scale and coordination of this campaign suggest the emergence of yet another centre of electoral control, possibly linked to the security services and the FSB.
However, for the average Russian voter, the key question regarding the current elections is not what percentage ‘United Russia’ will receive or whether the anti-war ‘Yabloko’ party will remain on the ballot paper, but whether the vote will be followed by a new ‘partial mobilisation’, rumours of which have been circulating for several months. And although there is, of course, no answer to this question, the logic behind the reformatting of the Duma campaign in its final stage suggests that, according to the Kremlin’s plan, the forthcoming elections and their results are intended to serve as a demonstration of public support for a policy of military escalation in one form or another.
Access regime: an election before the election
The 2026 State Duma elections are taking place amid a significant deterioration in Russia's economic and social situation. The military-economy bubble has created significant structural imbalances, instability in oil and gas revenues is placing pressure on public finances, while the protracted military conflict, the inability to achieve a decisive breakthrough in the war and Ukrainian attacks on Russia's economic infrastructure are contributing to deep frustration amongst the public.
The political purpose of elections in autocracies is to demonstrate reliable control over procedures that are, in principle, supposed to provide citizens with freedom of choice. The tools used to achieve the desired outcome, namely the removal of that freedom, are a crucial indicator of the stage of evolution reached by an authoritarian regime at any given moment.
One of the key institutions of authoritarian elections is the system governing the admission, or more precisely the exclusion, of undesirable participants from the electoral process. The nomination and registration of parliamentary candidates therefore provides a useful illustration of the main characteristics of the current access regime and its evolution compared with previous electoral campaigns. A brief overview of the quantitative indicators of this process in the 2026 State Duma elections is provided in a report by Alexander Kynev, a prominent specialist on Russian electoral and regional politics (→ Kynev: Features of the Composition of Party Lists in the State Duma Elections).
‘For the first time in the modern history of State Duma elections, only parties entitled to preferential registration of candidates nominated party lists and constituency candidates; no other party even attempted to do so. As a result, the number of parties taking part in the elections, which fell to 10 following Yabloko’s removal, is the lowest in Russia’s recent history, with the exception of the 2011 elections.
No party without the registration privilege nominated any candidates in single-member constituencies at all, although such candidates were still fielded in 2021. As a result, constituencies where there is genuine competition and a genuine contest, or at least the semblance of one, still exist, but their number is small compared with 2021 and is unlikely to exceed 25–30.
The total number of candidates who notified the District Election Commission of their intention to stand continues to decline: at the nomination stage in 2016 there were 2,438 candidates, in 2021 there were 2,296, and in 2026 there were only 1,723. In other words, even compared with 2021, the number of nominated candidates has fallen by 25%. The number of registered candidates has also fallen: as of 1 September 2021, there were 2,037, compared with 1,593 as of 14 September 2026 (a decrease of 22%). The number of independent candidates also continues to fall: in 2016 there were 300, of whom 23 were registered, and in 2021 there were 174, of whom 11 were registered. In 2026, just 83 candidates were nominated, meaning their number has more than halved, with only four registered nationwide.
This summary reflects a new stage in the narrowing of access to elections. Significantly, it is not only the number of those admitted to the elections through the Central Election Commission’s filter, i.e. through the registration procedure, that is declining, but also the number of parties and candidates attempting to secure registration. This trend is the result of both a general ‘purge’ of the activist community (some have left the country, others have withdrawn from activism), and a campaign of criminal cases or threats of prosecution, which was launched against activists seeking registration during the last elections in 2021. These included the cases of D. Gudkov, N. Platoshkin, V. Grudinina and others; a detailed overview of the coercive pressure on those seeking registration → OVD-Info: Shooting them down at a distance). The Administration’s political wing recognised that the campaign for access, even when unsuccessful, itself becomes a news story that mobilises opposition supporters and, as a result, delegitimises electoral procedures. The repressive campaign against this practice proved successful: this year, as we can see, activists did not opt to make the fight for registration a central strategy. This, in turn, reflects the consolidation of the authoritarian regime and the strength of its repressive capacity.
An additional filter: a second gatekeeper from the Second Service?
Despite this, the issue of electoral access nevertheless became a central theme of the 2026 election campaign. But this time, it took on a completely new form, and the trigger for this was not the actions of the opposition, but a shift in the balance of power and the regime’s own tools of control. The removal of already registered candidates became a new and additional mechanism for excluding participants from the elections, and this is the principal institutional innovation in the management of the ‘electoral process’.
The most high-profile case was the removal from the State Duma elections of the already registered party list of Yabloko. It is not entirely clear why the party was registered by the Central Election Commission in the first place. The Commission raised a number of objections to the party's list which, had it wished to do so, could have been expanded into grounds for refusing registration. Such an outcome would not have been particularly surprising. Instead, Yabloko was given time to ‘remedy’ the objections, and the list was ultimately registered on 29 June. By that point, however, a campaign against both the party's lists in regional elections and individual candidates was already under way in the regions. In Karelia, the Rodina party had already filed a lawsuit seeking to overturn the registration of Yabloko's regional list, using grounds almost identical to those it would invoke against the federal list a week later.
On 10 August, the Supreme Court, acting on the suit brought by Rodina, revoked the registration of Yabloko’s list at the federal level on the basis of a series of utterly absurd allegations, including alleged copyright violations involving the use of photographs and slogans. Nevertheless, Yabloko's removal from the elections prompted a public campaign in support of the party and small demonstrations, substantially increasing awareness of its anti-war position. The Supreme Court’s revocation of the registration generated the largest possible impact for an election campaign conducted under the current electoral conditions.
Moreover, this procedure for cancelling registration proved far from an isolated case in the current pre-election campaign, or simply an attempt to correct an earlier mistake. Between 29 July and 11 September, courts cancelled the registration of five already registered regional Yabloko lists, in Karelia, Pskov, Sverdlovsk, Kaliningrad and Tomsk regions. In St Petersburg and Leningrad region, the party's lists were blocked by electoral commissions before registration. As a result, the only registered regional party list remaining was in Novgorod region. At the same time, the registration of at least 28 Yabloko candidates standing in single-member constituencies in the State Duma elections was revoked (these final figures are provided by a source at Echo). The grounds were either similar lawsuits by rival candidates reproducing the logic of Rodina's case against Yabloko's lists, or administrative decisions concerning candidates' display of extremist symbols under Article 20.3 of the Code of Administrative Offences, which deprive them of the right to stand for election for one year. In two cases, the candidates themselves withdrew from the race under pressure from the security services (an incomplete overview of such cases was published by Kommersant on 14 September). In several instances, candidates from the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF) were also targeted by similar legal challenges. As a result, the popular blogger Nikolai Bondarenko lost his right to stand for election following a report concerning the display of extremist symbols, while in two cases the process of removing Communist candidates' access to the elections was not completed. The same practice is being applied to some candidates in regional elections.
In addition, from mid-August until 2 September, the parties themselves were actively purging their already registered federal lists. The CPRF, following a decision by the party leadership, removed one candidate, Ivan Lipovsky; New People removed four; and the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR) removed three. The largest number of candidates removed, however, came from Rodina and other non-parliamentary parties, with more than 30 people affected. In total, decisions by party leaderships resulted in the removal of 42 registered candidates from the lists, while several others independently submitted applications to withdraw from the elections. Thus, in addition to Yabloko's federal list, approximately 75 registered parliamentary candidates have been deprived of their registration.
The scale of these ‘disqualifications’ indicates that, in August and the first half of September, there was a fairly widespread and, in all likelihood, coordinated campaign to ‘purge’ already registered lists and candidates. Consequently, alongside the usual filters governing access to elections, whose principal operators are the electoral commissions, typically acting in coordination with the Presidential Administration's domestic policy directorate, another filter has emerged. This additional filter revises the decisions of the ‘first instance’ and further clears the electoral field.
Mechanisms for filtering out, or excluding, candidates and parties have long been in place in Russian electoral practice. They are well established and are not perceived by society as anything extraordinary. The new system merely increases the costs, making the restrictive procedures more visible and controversial. Therefore, in our view, its introduction can only be explained by the emergence of a new player, an agency responsible for overseeing elections alongside the Presidential Administration’s political management. One hypothesis is that the security services are coordinating these purges, most likely the FSB. This is consistent with the previously noted trend towards an expansion of the agency's political mandate, and in particular that of its Second Service. A compelling investigation by The Bell demonstrates that the Service for the Protection of the Constitutional Order is seeking oversight of a broad range of sensitive areas of information and ideological control. In this context, granting it an additional role in monitoring and screening parties and candidates admitted to elections appears entirely logical.
Be that as it may, the emergence of a ‘second filter’, an additional safeguard to prevent undesirable candidates from standing in elections, is the key innovation of the current elections and reflects the regime’s desire to further tighten political control. At the same time, two distinct substantive levels of this institutional innovation should be distinguished. The candidates removed by the second filter may not in themselves be particularly dangerous. However, within bureaucratic institutional logic, it is important for the new authority to establish and consolidate its right to exercise such filtering and to test its mechanisms in practice. At the structural level, meanwhile, the introduction of an additional filtering system points to growing Kremlin anxiety about the domestic political situation and increasing distrust of the traditional instruments and institutions of political control.
Two campaigns: from ‘therapeutic’ to mobilisation
According to Kremlin sources, in the spring, at the start of the election campaign, the Presidential Administration emphasised its ‘therapeutic’ nature and the legitimacy of the elections. This entailed moderately high demands on regional administrations to ensure turnout figures and results for ‘United Russia’ that did not diverge too greatly from public sentiment and expectations. At the end of June, against a backdrop of a clear deterioration in public sentiment, attacks on oil refineries and Wildberries warehouses, the targets were lowered: the Presidential Administration continued to prioritise legitimacy, that is, the relative plausibility of the results. In mid-July, at the height of the petrol crisis, the target figures for the regions, according to Meduza, were lowered once again: social tensions were mounting, whilst polling organisations were recording a decline in the approval ratings of the government and United Russia.
Alexander Kynev characterises the current Duma campaign as lacklustre. This is due not only to the complete absence of competition, but also to the particular way in which United Russia's candidate lists have been assembled. As Kynev writes in his report, the usual approach to selecting candidates for party lists and constituencies was to prioritise candidates with name recognition and some form of resource base, including financial, organisational and social resources, who could help mobilise local social networks in conditions of low turnout. This is why former mayors, well-known teachers, doctors, cultural figures, university leaders etc. frequently appeared among the candidates.
However, in 2026, Kynev notes that a significant proportion of candidates have been nominated for symbolic and ideological reasons. According to publicly available data, United Russia's list includes at least 32 candidates who are military personnel, participants in the ‘special military operation’, or people connected with military infrastructure, the organisation of aid and support for the armed forces. The figure of 76 has been cited in the media when single-member constituencies are included. Increasing the share of such candidates, who are not integrated into local social networks, do not draw on organised social groups or large workforces, and lack resources of their own, effectively shifts the entire burden of electoral mobilisation onto regional authorities. This significantly increases the risk of administrative overstretch and creates additional resource problems for regional administrations to resolve. This may be one reason why authorities at different levels have sought to make the 2026 election campaign as low-key as possible and, where possible, to discourage independent voters from participating, Kynev concludes.
However, by the end of the summer, according to Meduza sources within United Russia, the KPIs required of regional administrations, namely turnout and United Russia's result, had once again begun to rise. Putin entered the election campaign, and the imperative now became to demonstrate high results, while the previous emphasis on ‘legitimacy’ became less relevant.
As Andrey Pertsev has astutely observed, the Kremlin's election campaign has split in two. The initial approach of Sergei Kiriyenko's team, which oversees domestic policy in the Presidential Administration, was to ‘dry out’ the elections in order to reduce the risks of protest voting, relying on calming rhetoric and the downplaying of inconvenient issues, particularly the ‘special military operation’, which is unpopular among voters. Putin's intervention disrupted this plan: he began speaking extensively about the war and geopolitics, returning the campaign to a mobilisational logic.
This clear assessment requires only a slight clarification. Putin’s entry into the election campaign can be considered to have begun with his speech at the ‘United Russia’ congress on 28 June. This was followed by a series of trips around the country and, as observers have noted, specifically to regions relatively less affected by Ukrainian drone strikes, namely Siberia and the Far East. In these regions, Vladimir Putin predominantly pursued a ‘peaceful’ agenda of sorts, centred on a form of paternalistic developmentalism. He painted a positive picture of confident technological and economic development in Siberia and the Far East under the state's leading and guiding role (see table in the Appendix). Geopolitical and military themes naturally arose during visits to Pacific Fleet exercises and the Kuril Islands, but the war with Ukraine itself remained somewhat in the background during the trip rather than constituting a distinct agenda.
The situation arguably changed with Putin’s speech at the second part of the ‘United Russia’ congress on 22 August. Compared with his first address, the war occupies a fundamentally different place in the second. In the first, it accounts for approximately one sixth of the text as a whole, 15 of 90 complete sentences, while in the second it accounts for almost a third, 19 of 65. Although the quantitative change is significant in itself, the more important shift is the change in the tone of the statements.
In the first address, the war is present largely as a context for the election campaign and the challenges facing the country. In the second, the central theme is effectively the mobilisational narrative of the ‘unity of the front lines and the home front’ in achieving a common victory: ‘Our strength and confidence in the future lie in the unity of the front and the home front, of all generations of Russian society, and in the strength of the values handed down to us by our ancestors ... Much now depends on our cohesion, on the courage of Russian soldiers and officers, and on everyone who conscientiously does their job in order to contribute to victory ... I am confident that our soldiers will not let us down. The whole of Russia is with them now: workforces, factories, plants, agricultural workers. Everyone: scientists, entrepreneurs, engineers, volunteers, our People's Front, all civil society ... It is the duty of the party, the duty of United Russia, to do everything for victory.’
From 20 August onwards, the topic of the war returned to the centre of the news agenda, during Putin's trip to Bishkek and the visit of Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner to Moscow, as well as to the surrounding propaganda imagery, including the passage about polar bears and killer whales during a meeting with teachers, and a series of events surrounding the ‘rediscovered’ relics of Dmitry Donskoy. The themes and rhetorical devices introduced in the congress speech were then effectively repeated in Putin’s address to the citizens of Russia on the occasion of the 16 September elections (‘We know what Russia is fighting for and what the duty of each of its citizens is. Our heroes are forging victory on the battlefield. Everyone who works honestly for the Motherland and understands their responsibility for its future is helping to bring it closer. And taking part in the forthcoming vote, which will take place in the Year of the Unity of the Peoples of Russia, is also a responsibility and a contribution to strengthening the country’).
Thus, as with the issue of access to the elections, we appear to be witnessing a hijacking of the agenda here. Whilst the Presidential Administration’s original campaign plan emphasised the legitimacy of the elections (this is the context in which Yabloko’s initial admission should presumably be assessed) and ‘therapeutic’, peaceful themes, the alternative concept places the emphasis on extraordinary coercive measures, such as the cancellation of registrations, and mobilisational rhetoric in which the entire country is conceived as a single organism working towards a common victory.
From this perspective, the elections themselves, and their inevitably high results, are intended to serve as confirmation of support for Putin's course not towards negotiated scenarios for ending the conflict, but rather towards an escalation of military efforts to achieve victory.
For the average Russian voter, the central issue of the State Duma elections is not what percentage of the vote ‘United Russia’ will receive, or whether the anti-war party Yabloko will appear on the ballot papers. This voter is largely convinced that the course and outcome of the elections are fully controlled by the authorities and are unlikely to be affected by their own participation or non-participation in the vote, or even by a coordinated campaign by an opposition that has been weakened and driven out of the country. For the average voter, the central issue of these elections is whether a new ‘partial mobilisation’ will be announced after they end, rumours of which have been circulating in Russia for at least two months. And although there is, of course, no answer to this question, the logic of the reformatting of the Duma campaign during August and the first half of September indicates that, in the Kremlin's conception, the forthcoming elections and their results are intended to demonstrate public support for a policy of military escalation in one form or another.