What is the Point of an Election Without Choice?

Let’s dispense with the pleasantries. What took place in Russia from March 15th to 17th was not an election. An election implies choice, competition, and at least a sliver of uncertainty. This was a ritual. A carefully staged, three-day performance designed to produce one, and only one, outcome: the reaffirmation of Vladimir Putin's absolute power.

The official result—a comical 87% of the vote for the incumbent—is meaningless as a statistic. But it is deeply meaningful as a statement of intent. The Kremlin is using this manufactured landslide to send a message to its own people and to the world: there is no alternative to Putin. The war in Ukraine will continue. The confrontation with the West will deepen. Dissent will be crushed.

This was a performance of power in a country where all real politics has been extinguished.

The stage was set months in advance. The most charismatic and courageous opposition figure, Alexei Navalny, was already dead, assassinated by the state in an Arctic penal colony just weeks before the vote. It was a brutally effective message to anyone else who might dare to challenge the Tsar. The few anti-war candidates who tried to get on the ballot were quickly disqualified on absurd technicalities. The three "opponents" who were allowed to run were puppets, Kremlin-approved props whose job was to stand on stage and make the one-man show look slightly less pathetic.

The entire state apparatus was mobilized to produce a high turnout, the key metric of legitimacy in a system without competition. Public sector workers were strong-armed into voting. Electronic balloting, opaque and easily manipulated, was used on a mass scale. And in the most cynical act of all, Russia staged voting in the occupied territories of Ukraine, forcing people to cast ballots at gunpoint in a grotesque parody of self-determination.

And yet, even in this suffocating atmosphere, there were flickers of defiance. The "Noon against Putin" protest, a final wish of Alexei Navalny, saw thousands of people across the country line up at polling stations at the same time. They didn't chant slogans or hold signs. They just stood there, a silent, visible expression of their dissent, a way of seeing that they were not alone.

It was a small act of immense courage. A reminder that in the darkest police state, the human spirit of resistance is never completely extinguished.

But it does not change the grim reality. Putin has now secured another six years in power, which will make him the longest-serving Russian leader since Catherine the Great. He will take this manufactured mandate as a green light to intensify his war in Ukraine and to continue his project of remaking Russia into a militarized, isolated, and deeply anti-Western state.

The Tsar’s new clothes are made of fraudulent ballots and coerced votes. He may be parading them as a sign of his strength and the unity of his people, but the whole world can see the ugly truth of the dictatorship underneath.