Russia Votes in Duma Election With No Real Opposition to Putin

Russians began casting ballots on Friday in a three-day parliamentary election that will choose a new State Duma, the lower house of parliament, along with a slate of regional and local offices. Voting runs through Sunday across the country's 11 time zones, with electronic balloting permitted and polling extended over three days in an effort to lift turnout among roughly 111 million eligible voters. Balloting is also being held in areas Russia annexed from Ukraine.

The contest offers voters no genuine opposition. United Russia, the Kremlin's main party, and nine other parties on the ballot all back President Vladimir Putin's policies. The liberal Yabloko party, the only registered party that opposes the war, was removed from the party-list ballot by the Supreme Court in August, which cited among its reasons that an anti-war stance amounted to seeking a violation of Russia's territorial integrity. Yabloko's candidates now appear only in single-mandate races.

Half of the Duma's 450 seats are allocated by party lists and the other half decided in single-mandate constituencies. United Russia, whose emblem is a bear beneath the Russian tricolor, took more than two-thirds of the seats in 2021 and is again expected to dominate. Its list is headed by Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, 76, and Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin, 68, with war correspondent Yevgeny Poddubny, who was badly wounded by a Ukrainian drone, in the third slot.

Sobyanin, seen as a pragmatist, has resisted calls from hardliners for a broad mobilization of conscripts and a full war footing, saying that destroying a normal economy would destroy the country. The election is the first since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and the Kremlin wants it to signal public support for the war while stamping out any sign of dissent.

The Communist Party, led for more than three decades by 82-year-old Gennady Zyuganov, remains a leading parliamentary force and firmly backs the war, as does the ultranationalist Liberal Democratic Party, now led by Leonid Slutsky after the 2022 death of founder Vladimir Zhirinovsky. Its candidates include Viktor Bout, the former arms trader exchanged in December 2022 for WNBA star Brittney Griner. A Just Russia, led by Sergei Mironov, and the New People party, founded before the 2021 vote and led by Alexei Nechayev, also support the government's policies. Smaller parties, including Communists of Russia, the Party of Pensioners, the Green Party, the Party of Direct Democracy and the nationalist Motherland party, are also contesting seats. Motherland's leader, Alexei Zhuravlev, brought the case that removed Yabloko from the ballot.

Voters in 11 regions will also elect governors, and 39 regions will choose members of regional legislatures. The vote comes as the war's economic costs mount and Ukrainian drone strikes on oil refineries and online retailers bring the conflict home to Russians.