The view from Russia: ‘No party can be antiwar’ in parliamentary election

This weekend, Russians are heading to the ballot box to vote in the first parliamentary election since the war with Ukraine began in early 2022.

Theoretically up for grabs are 450 seats in Russia’s parliament, the Duma, though the governing United Russia party, led by President Vladimir Putin, is expected to retain its comfortable majority.

One of the hopefuls is Damir Gurin, who is running for the Green Party in Russia’s Far Eastern Federal District, where the forests of Siberia meet the Pacific Ocean. His policies include affordable housing, monitoring industrial emissions and promoting recycling over landfills.

“My goal is to provide this harsh land and its people with worthy ecological and institutional representation,” Gurin told Al Jazeera. “We’re not just solving the problems of nature, we’re protecting the human habitat.”

Although the environment is a concern in Russia, other issues may overshadow it.

“This extensive election campaign is taking place as we continue the special military operation,” Putin stated in a public address on Wednesday, using the official euphemism for the invasion of Ukraine. “Your choice and determination will show once again that millions of people are backing our fighters and that we stand together.”

Among the top candidates being fielded by United Russia are the hawkish former president Dmitry Medvedev and Vladislav Golovin, a veteran of the siege of Mariupol.

Ilya Budraitskis, a Russian social scientist based in California, said the Kremlin is seeking a popular mandate for its handling of the Ukraine war.

“Putin constantly describes [Ukraine President Volodymyr] Zelenskyy as illegitimate, because he does not hold an election in wartime,” Budraitskis told Al Jazeera. “In Russia, as Putin has just stressed, in strict accordance with the schedule, as per the law, elections are held on time, and, accordingly, the Russian authorities keep their legitimacy.”

‘The ceiling shakes’

The elections come as the war is being increasingly felt on the home front.

On Friday morning, Ukraine launched more than 350 drones towards Moscow as the election got under way.

Kyiv’s attacks on Russian oil infrastructure have caused fuel shortages, while the authorities have imposed internet blackouts in the name of national security.

“If there’s fuel at the gas station, people immediately line up,” said Aleksey, a Saint Petersburg resident in his mid-thirties who declined to provide his full name.

He considers the elections a “sham”.

“My mother lives outside the city near a gunpowder factory, and [drone attacks] happen periodically,” he said. There are “loud explosions, the ceiling shakes and plaster falls off the house, and sometimes she has to hide in the bathroom with the dog”.

Do these crises sway public opinion?

According to the independent pollster Levada, more than half of Russians support peace talks, yet nearly 70 percent say they also support the actions of the armed forces in Ukraine.

“I spent a week in my home village, and in the past year the mood there has gotten so bad in terms of radicalisation, militarisation, human rights, and so on,” said Katherine, a St Petersburg psychiatrist in her sixties, who requested Al Jazeera withhold her surname.

“Bombing everyone, taking everything away from all the ‘damned traitors’… I don’t know if my neighbours can be considered a focus group, but if so, the prospects don’t look very encouraging.”

Exiled opposition figures based abroad, including Ilya Yashin and Yulia Navalnaya, have urged Russians to vote for any party other than United Russia.

Max, a young Muscovite, said he has used an online tool which advises dissenting Russians who to vote for.

“They tell me which candidate, not from the ruling party, has the best chance of winning. This won’t lead to an end to the war, but at least I can sleep soundly,” he told Al Jazeera.

Aleksey is considering voting for the Communist Party “even though I understand that in the current situation, no party can be against war”.

Antiwar party removed from election

Of all of Russia’s major parties, only the liberal Yabloko openly opposes the war and calls for an immediate ceasefire.

But in August, a judge excluded it from the election after a complaint from a small nationalist party, Rodina, over alleged copyright infringement, “extremism”, and overseas funding.

“Of course, it happened because according to polls, Yabloko would have overcome the 5 percent barrier,” the minimum seats needed to win Duma representation, said Budraitskis.

“Yabloko would have led an election campaign under these slogans of immediate peaceful negotiations, the lifting of all [wartime] restrictions, the cessation of repression, and so on. And it would be extremely dangerous to allow such a public campaign, because it was obviously popular.”

But for Sergey Kalenik, a Moscow-based media professional who supports Putin’s government, the exclusion of Yabloko means Russian democracy has “flourished.”

“Previously, elections were a real life-or-death struggle, because any attempts by patriots to gain ground were blocked,” he told Al Jazeera.

He described Yabloko cofounder Grigory Yavlinsky as “a fanatical Ukrainian nationalist [who] wants to make all Russians slaves of Ukrainians.”

“What kind of democracy can there be when such a party exists in parliament?” he asked rhetorically.

Nevertheless, although most of their candidates were disqualified, individual Yabloko members are still allowed to run for single-mandate constituencies rather than competing on a party-list basis. In Moscow, Yabloko’s Polina Lermant handed out flyers urging Muscovites to “vote for peace”.

Gurin, the Green candidate, acknowledged that lawsuits and allegations could be political tricks, but said dozens of candidates from other parties have also been disqualified, including Nikolai Bondarenko, the Saratov representative of the normally pro-Kremlin Communists.

“The political environment is an arena of strict discipline and competition,” said Gurin.