Russian governors: The silent ruling party

In September, Russia will go to the polls for parliamentary elections, and in the campaign that is now getting underway, the traditional allies of United Russia, Putin’s party, appear for the first time to be intent on distancing themselves in order to capitalise on popular discontent. Thus, to close ranks, the Kremlin is rallying the loyalist leaders of local administrations.

Moscow (AsiaNews) - Russia is entering the campaign for the Duma parliamentary elections to be held in September. This time, the election could see a genuine contest emerge between Putin’s United Russia party and its traditional allies: the Communists of the KPRF, the liberal-nationalists of the LDPR, the law-and-order advocates of “Fair Russia”, and the front party “New People”, created in its day to counter Alexei Navalny’s popular opposition.

The liberals of Yabloko are increasingly being sidelined from the contest, with their leaders and potential candidates being jailed on trumped-up charges, but the others are attempting to capitalise on popular discontent over internet blocks and the increasingly evident economic crisis.

Hence the Kremlin is taking pre-emptive action with the most characteristic weapon of the “Putinist vertical”, deploying governors to defend Moscow’s policies. Since the start of the year, President Vladimir Putin has met successively with 23 regional leaders, many of whom find themselves in rather precarious situations due to local problems and the need to secure confirmation of their mandates, whether through appointment by the central government or through elections still required under various statutes. Since the start of the special military operation in Ukraine, regional policy has been dictated by the Kremlin as a tool for gauging public sentiment, and as an operational reserve for political cadres in need of reorganisation.

On 6 May, Putin met with the governor of Tambov, Evgeny Pervyshov, where no elections are in the pipeline, but one of the most intensive programmes on the ‘Time of Heroes’ is currently underway.

On 4 May, the president of Dagestan was dismissed and temporarily replaced by a staunch Putin loyalist, Fedor Shchukin, who, incidentally, has not yet been invited to Moscow to meet the president. Regional elections will, however, be held in Mordovia, the “region of the labour camps” in central Russia, and Governor Artem Zhdanov visited the Kremlin, as did Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov and the governor of Penza, Oleg Melnichenko, to receive the president’s blessing.

Several governors whose terms are due to expire in 2027 also attended meetings with Putin: the governor of Nizhny Novgorod, Gleb Nikitin, one of the most promising implementers of Putin’s policies at regional level; Aleksandr Brečalov of Udmurtia; Mikhail Evraev of Yaroslavl; and others, all of whom are up for re-election between now and the next two years, when in 2028 the mayor of Moscow, Sergei Sobyanin—who has held the post since 2010—will also stand for re-election.

The ‘opposition’ parties have so far been in no hurry to declare their participation in the regional elections, focusing instead on the parliamentary elections to avoid confusion and overlap, and seeking to exploit the flaws in the Kremlin’s strategies.

Some governors will be elected on the same day as the Duma elections, 20 September 2026, but there will be no real competition in these cases, thanks to the careful manoeuvring of the vertical administration. KPRF analyst Sergei Obukhov told Nezavisimaya Gazeta that the only region the Communists are targeting is Ulyanovsk Oblast, with its capital Samara – the birthplace of Vladimir Lenin – where they already hold the governorship through Aleksey Russkikh, an economist and former senator in Moscow.

The Kremlin must choose whom to retain and whom to discard, and these ‘silent supporting figures’ of the Putin regime can be swapped like pieces in a board game at any moment, to test the effectiveness of control measures across the entire federal territory. The ‘economic cooling’, as Moscow defines the state of progressive crisis, affects the populations of European, northern, Siberian and Far Eastern Russia differently, and to avoid upheaval, appropriate tools and figures are needed in the various situations to revive the increasingly waning ‘social optimism’.