Incumbent Vladimir Putin has been officially registered as a candidate in Russia's upcoming presidential election, a vote he is expected to easily win with most of his main opponents in jail or outside the country, having fled for security concerns.
Russia's Central Election Commission (TsIK) on January 29 registered Putin as an independent candidate for the March 17 election, saying he had gathered at least 300,000 signatures backing him from across the country, the threshold needed for a candidate to be nominated without the backing of any political party.
Putin, who has run the country as president or prime minister since 1999, has taken advantage of a raft of 2020 constitutional reforms that gave him the right to seek two more six-year terms, meaning he could stay in office until 2036.
The 71-year-old Putin is already the longest-serving Kremlin leader since Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, who died in 1953 at the age of 74.
Russian elections are tightly controlled by the Kremlin and are neither free nor fair but are viewed by the government as necessary to convey a sense of legitimacy. They are marred by the exclusion of opposition candidates, voter intimidation, ballot stuffing, and other means of manipulation.
In mid-November, Putin signed into law a bill on amendments to the law on presidential elections, which restricts coverage of the poll, while also giving the TsIK the right to change the election procedure in territories where martial law has been introduced.
WATCH: Russian opposition candidate Boris Nadezhdin, running for President Vladimir Putin's job in the March election, says the war on Ukraine has been a disaster. Nadezhdin has collected the legally required 100,000 signatures for his nomination as a candidate for Russian president, he says. Past opposition candidates now in jail or in exile have also endorsed Nadezhdin.
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Running Against Putin: Boris Nadezhdin's Bid For Presidency Aims To End 'Catastrophe'
Putin becomes the fourth candidate approved to run in the vote. The others are Liberal Democratic Party leader Leonid Slutsky; State Duma Deputy speaker Vladislav Davankov, who represents the New People party' and State Duma lawmaker Nikolai Kharitonov, a Communist Party member -- though no serious challenger has emerged amid an ongoing crackdown on dissent and opposition.
Much of Russia’s organized political opposition has been driven abroad by the government’s repression, which intensified following the 2018 presidential election and has accelerated steadily since Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Russia has been trending toward authoritarianism since the beginning of Putin’s tenure. But since 2018, that trend has been more firmly entrenched than ever.
The already marginalized opposition has been crushed. Leading opposition figures Aleksei Navalny, Vladimir Kara-Murza, and Ilya Yashin have been handed long prison terms.
Draconian laws restricting free speech have been adopted since Moscow’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and, together with laws on “foreign agents” and “extremism,” have been used to quash dissent.
Still, one prospective challenger, 60-year-old liberal academic Boris Nadezhdin, has emerged recently and appears to have built enough support to submit his application to become an official candidate backed by the Civic Initiative Party before the January 31 deadline.
Thousands of Russians have been lining up across the country to sign him up for the balloting, attracted by his open calls for a halt to the war against Ukraine, an end to military mobilization, dialogue with the West, and an end to the country’s repression of LGBTQ+ activism.
Last week, he said he had the required amount of backing to become an official candidate, though he had yet to officially apply.
A petition not to register Putin as a candidate signed by 26 former and current lawmakers across Russia was sent to the TsIK earlier, but was rejected.
That petition emphasized that there were numerous violations of laws during the process of collecting signatures of Putin's supporters. For example, in the country’s second-largest city, St. Petersburg, election officials were collecting the signatures to support Putin, which is not allowed by the law.
Regional officials were pushing for Putin while collecting the signatures, which is also a violation, the petition said.
The presidential election is the first to be held since Putin ordered the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Tens of thousands of Russian soldiers have died in the war, the Russian economy has been hit by Western sanctions over the invasion, and Moscow's relations with the United States and the European Union have deteriorated dramatically.