Nomination and registration of candidates for local assemblies and heads of municipalities, scheduled for September 8, 2024

This year, elections of members of representative bodies and heads of municipalities are taking place in a situation of political apathy among political elites. These elections demonstrate that in the current conditions, the intensity of election campaigns rarely depends on the political parties themselves as political subjects.

Parties have to coordinate with the authorities not only the lists of candidates and the distribution of electoral districts, but also the course of their election campaign itself.

Uncoordinated candidates can be “weeded out” at the registration stage by election commissions: various methods are used for this, including labeling the candidate as a foreign agent.

Some intensity is added to electoral campaigns by intra-elite conflicts, which intensify in the run-up to elections in regions where sufficient fragmentation still exists. The peculiarity of these conflicts is that elite groups – unlike civil activists and democratic politicians – have sufficient financial resources to, for example, ensure that their candidates can easily collect voters' signatures. The most active political life is preserved at the level of local self-government. It is this level that today has the greatest potential for the rapid revival of real elections, political discussion and competition.

1. Most existing political parties will have little to no presence in the 2024 elections.
2. In an environment where candidates are arbitrarily barred from elections, political parties show maximum loyalty by avoiding any candidates that might be inconvenient to regime. This is particularly evident in the State Duma by-elections, where the process has taken on an openly prearranged nature.
3. Due to the low number of participants amid political repression, very few candidates are eliminated — less than 3% — since so few even attempt to run.
4. In the elections to the legislative assemblies, parties without enough mandates to register candidates without collecting signatures nominated only 73 candidates — more than four times fewer than the number of mandates. Of these, 28 candidates were registered, all in Moscow.
5. For parties without the privilege of having enough mandates to register candidates without collecting signatures, the realistic chances of registration are mostly limited to spoiler candidates rather than those genuinely aiming to compete for voter support."
6. With sufficient resources and preparation, it is not difficult to register a candidate, a so called spoiler whose main task is not to strive for victory, but only to hinder other candidates, to take away their votes. Naturally, such duplicate candidates do not have any real electoral base. And at the same time, candidates who certainly have such support among voters are not registered by signatures.
7. The authorities have become more active in using the removal of opposition candidates through the initiation of administrative cases under Article 20.3, Part 1 of the Code of Administrative Offenses (public display of prohibited symbols) or the labeling of candidates as foreign agents.

Read more in our report (in Russian)