“I don't like any of the candidates, I would prefer there to be others, but I have decided to come and vote anyway,” says Oleg, a liberal by profession, in the middle of the long queue that formed this Sunday at 12 noon and under the intimidating gaze of a dozen police officers, uniformed, armed and wearing bulletproof vests. Russia has deployed strong security measures at voting centers during a presidential election that lasted three days and which, as expected, the current Kremlin tenant, Vladimir Putin, won with 87% of the votes, according to preliminary data ( around a quarter of the vote counted).
When the journalist arrived at Moscow's number one polling station, at the Central Actor's House on Arbat Street, there were barely five people who passed through the metal arches of the lobby and were searched by several police officers. But at noon, about two hundred people seemed to have agreed to go vote at the same time. He was thus responding to the action called by the opposition, “Noon against Putin”, to show their rejection of the Kremlin.
“If there had been real debates of ideas, competing programs, other candidates, if it had been like in a non-authoritarian country, then I would know who I was going to vote for,” Oleg continued, giving a detour in his response.
“Of course I have come to vote against Putin,” said another of the attendees, Yelena, a geographer by profession, less reluctant to openly explain the meaning of her vote.
The “Midday against Putin” initiative is the last wish of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who died last month in an Arctic penal colony. From prison, in December he supported this initiative and after his widow, Yulia Naválnaya, and her team were buried in Moscow, they took up the idea to turn the last day of elections into a day of protest against Putin. Navalnaya asked in a video broadcast on YouTube to vote for another candidate other than the head of the Kremlin, or to put “Navalni” on the ballot or to put a null vote in the ballot box.
Thousands of Russians have gone to polling stations throughout Russia at noon to join this peaceful protest action. Symbolic, but with relative impact. Navalny's team has published videos on YouTube of lines of people at different polling stations in the country in what they stressed is a peaceful protest.
“I'm going to check two boxes, so the vote will be null and my position will be clear. But I understand that this is just a drop in the ocean and that there are actually very few of us,” Yelena laments.
Indeed, thirty minutes later, almost everyone who had formed a line to the popular Vagtangov Theater on the other side of Arbat Street had already entered the polling station to participate in these peculiar Russian presidential elections, in which we already knew in advance that Putin was going to sweep.
At another polling station, 2123, on Grimau Street in the Akademicheskaya neighborhood, far from the center, the line of voters at twelve noon was much shorter, about twenty people, although significant, because it was the only time of the day in which we had to wait in the street. And something similar happened at polling station 2708, on Matveyevskaya Street, in the Ochakovo neighborhood, west of the Russian capital.
The action “Noon against Putin” was also followed outside Russia. In the queue that formed in front of the Russian embassy in Berlin to vote, Yulia Naválnaya and the former oligarch and now exiled opponent Mikhail Khodorkovsky could be seen.
