Vladimir Putin is set to secure another six-year term as Russian leader this weekend in a vote the Kremlin says will show society is fully behind his assault on Ukraine.
In power as president or prime minister since the final day of 1999, Putin has quashed all forms of opposition and dissent, exerting a level of domestic control that ensures the result is in no doubt.
Victory in the March 15-17 contest will allow him to stay in the Kremlin until at least 2030, longer than any Russian leader since Catherine the Great in the eighteenth century.
The poll comes at a time of high confidence for the former KGB agent.
Russia’s troops in Ukraine have chalked up their first battlefield gains in months.
And Putin’s most strident critic, Alexei Navalny, died in an Arctic prison colony last month.
Though Putin is blasted as a pariah in the West, the Kremlin says the vote will show that Russians at home are unified behind him and his offensive.
“He has no rivals at the moment and cannot have any,” Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said last year.
“Nobody can realistically compete with him,” he said.
‘Important elections’
Despite the ceremonial undertones, the Kremlin takes the electoral process seriously.
Moscow has poured resources into a campaign designed to whip up enthusiasm for Putin.
The president has toured the country and was filmed flying in the cockpit of a supersonic nuclear bomber, burnishing his tough-guy credentials.
“These elections are very important for the Kremlin,” Chatham House fellow Nikolai Petrov told AFP.
“It is needed to demonstrate that Russians overwhelmingly support Putin” during the military offensive, he said.
The Kremlin is aiming to secure a higher level of support for Putin than in his previous four election wins.
In 2018, official results showed he got 77.5 percent of the vote.
Even with no real competition, that contest was marred by widespread accusations of ballot-stuffing, fraud and forced voting.
This year Putin will officially face three other contenders — Kremlin-approved candidates designed to give a facade of competition.
Anti-Putin politician Boris Nadezhdin was blocked from standing after tens of thousands of Russians backed his surprise bid to run on a pro-peace message.
‘No doubt’
The Kremlin had previously allowed a liberal candidate to run in what analysts once called Russia’s “managed democracy”.
Now the term they use is “autocracy” — or “totalitarian”.
Ballots will also be cast in the four Ukrainian regions Moscow claimed to have annexed in 2022, as well as the Crimean peninsula, seized in 2014.
Moscow is no longer worried about trying to present the vote as a legitimate democratic exercise to the West, or even Russian society, Petrov said.
“The most important thing… is that political elites should not have any doubts that Putin is really supported by the vast majority of Russians,” he said.
Less than a year after an aborted mutiny by mercenary boss Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Kremlin will want to show possible rivals and successors that Putin is secure on his throne.
From exile and behind bars, Russia’s remaining opposition figures still hope they can spoil the procession.
They want anti-Putin Russians to form huge queues outside polling stations on the final day of voting.
Navalny’s widow, Yulia Navalnaya, says the show of dissent could spook Putin.
The Kremlin appears unfazed.
“We will hold the kind of elections that our people need,” Peskov said earlier this month, dismissing those who describe the vote as neither free nor fair.
“We won’t tolerate any criticism of our democracy. Our democracy is the best.”
AFP
The Israeli military announced on Wednesday it had struck two naval cruise missile production facilities operating under Iran’s ministry of defence in Tehran.
“In recent days, the Israeli air force acting on IDF intelligence struck two key naval cruise missile production sites in Tehran,” the military said.
It said the facilities were used to “develop and manufacture long-range naval cruise missiles, which are capable of rapidly destroying targets at sea and on land”.
The strikes “represent another step in deepening the damage done to the regime’s military production infrastructure”, the military added.
Last week, the military announced its fighter jets had struck several Iranian naval ships in the Caspian Sea, including vessels equipped with anti-submarine missiles.
AFP
The number of migrants who died on the “Eastern Route” from the Horn of Africa to the Arabian Peninsula doubled to a record high of 922 last year, the UN migration agency said Wednesday.
Tens of thousands of migrants from Ethiopia, Somalia and neighbouring countries take the route across the Red Sea each year, mostly from Djibouti to Yemen, in search of work as labourers or domestic workers in wealthy Gulf countries.
“2025 was the deadliest year ever recorded on the Eastern migration route… with 922 people dead or missing — double the number from the previous year,” Tanja Pacifico, head of mission for the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) in Djibouti, told AFP.
The majority of victims were from Ethiopia, the second most-populous country in Africa with more than 130 million people. It is plagued by multiple internal conflicts and deep poverty.
“IOM remains fully committed to working alongside the government of Djibouti to promote safe and dignified migration pathways, in order to prevent further tragedies,” said Pacifico.
Many migrants who cross the Red Sea find themselves stuck in Yemen, the poorest country on the Arabian Peninsula, which has been embroiled in a civil war for nearly a decade, and some even choose to return.
Rapid economic growth in Ethiopia — estimated to reach around 10 percent in 2026 — could encourage less migration, IOM says, but that is mitigated by high inflation, also around 10 percent in February.
AFP
Denmark’s political parties began the thorny process of forming a government Wednesday, with the centrist Moderates as kingmaker after the prime minister’s Social Democrats scraped through a general election without a majority.
Danes were braced for a weeks-long process as Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen seeks to consolidate power in the deeply splintered parliament after Tuesday’s snap vote.
A left-wing bloc made up of five parties, including Frederiksen’s Social Democrats, won 84 seats; the right-wing and far-right claimed 77; and the Moderates won 14 in the election.
The Social Democrats posted their worst election score since 1903—though they remained Denmark’s largest single party, with 38 seats in the 179-seat parliament.
Frederiksen formally tendered her coalition government’s resignation to King Frederik on Wednesday, telling a televised party leader debate she wanted to try to form a centre-left government.
“The most realistic scenario” would be a coalition with the five parties on the left and the centre-right Moderates, she said.
But it is not certain the Moderates, led by Foreign Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen, would agree to that.
“I don’t believe that Denmark needs policies aligned with” the leftist Red-Green Alliance, Lokke said.
King Frederik was to meet party leaders individually later Wednesday to determine who should be asked to try to form the next government.
“My expectation is that Mette Frederiksen will become prime minister,” University of Copenhagen political science professor Rune Stubager told reporters.
“But I don’t know with the backing of which parties, like the left wing or the right wing,” he said.
He noted that Lokke, a two-time former prime minister, would likely vie for the position of prime minister, even though he has adamantly denied any interest in the job.
“Danes want me and not another prime minister. I still have the backing to be able to continue on behalf of the Danish people,” Frederiksen insisted during the debate.
Frederiksen has for the past four years headed an unprecedented left-right coalition made up of her Social Democrats, the Moderates and the Liberals.
The Liberals have refused to continue in a Social Democrat-led government.
Danes are now prepared for long negotiations. After the 2022 election, the talks lasted six weeks.
“It’s a long process, which means the government won’t be formed and it will be quite difficult to pass laws during this period,” lamented Jesper Dyrfjeld Christensen, a 54-year-old engineer.
“It’s really too hard to say who will be part of the coalition,” admitted Stubager.
With 12 parties in parliament, the political landscape is jagged — though Denmark is accustomed to minority governments.
“To some extent, this is the way Danish politics works. You have a minority government in the centre which forms a majority with the left on some issues and with the right on others,” he explained.
The negotiations are expected to focus on economic and pension issues, pollution and immigration, he said.
The traditional far-right party, the Danish People’s Party, which has heavily influenced policy since the late 1990s but slumped in the 2022 election, more than tripled its result to 9.1 per cent of votes.
The three anti-immigration groups together garnered 17 per cent, a stable figure for Denmark’s populist right over the past two decades.
“If negotiations take place in the left-wing bloc with the moderates, then there will be more focus on green issues than on immigration,” Stubager said.
“But if, instead, the Moderates negotiate with the parties on the right, then the central issue will be immigration.”
Four seats in Denmark’s parliament are held by its two autonomous territories — two for Greenland and two for the Faroe Islands.
While the Faroese renewed the mandates of the two outgoing lawmakers, with one for each bloc, Greenland overwhelmingly backed the left-wing party and Naleraq, which advocates rapid independence from Denmark.
AFP
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