Putin's Real Opposition Is a Collective Shrug

Two months before the Russian presidential election, the country's only independent national pollster, Levada Center, has refused to publish election-related data: Because it has received overseas funding, it's been designated as a "foreign agent" -- a status that prevents it from any participation in the electoral process. But that may be just as well. With no doubt as to who's going to win, the exercise only makes sense as a contest between two candidates -- Vladimir Putin and Whatever, a concept that's not easy to reflect in a traditional poll.

Putin doesn't appear to feel any need to campaign. His election website, as perfunctory as if he were running for a municipal council seat, has just gone live, and it doesn't even contain a program or any promises -- just some questionable statements on how life in Russia has improved under Putin ("The illegal cutting of trees has practically stopped"; "Russian universities have entered the BRICS Top-50"). The site also reports that it only took a week for the Putin campaign to collect 30 percent more than the 300,000 citizens' signatures necessary to put him on the ballot -- an impossible achievement for any other candidate but not for the president: Reports come in from different parts of the country of students being pressed into collecting the signatures and workers told to sign for him at work (the campaign has even rejected the signatures harvested at two factories in Kurgan in the Urals).