Young voters divided and mistrustful

© RIA Novosti . Kirill Kalinnikov / Go to the mediabankMany doubt the honesty of the upcoming elections, they nevertheless said the best way to voice their discontent is by going to the polls in support of other parties.
Many doubt the honesty of the upcoming elections, they nevertheless said the best way to voice their discontent is by going to the polls in support of other parties. - Sputnik International
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Scores of teenage girls may be cheerleading and tens of thousands of youth may be rallying for the Kremlin and the ruling United Russia party, but ahead of the parliamentary vote this Sunday voting for the opposition is increasingly in fashion among the educated youth.

Scores of teenage girls may be cheerleading and tens of thousands of youth may be rallying for the Kremlin and the ruling United Russia party, but ahead of the parliamentary vote this Sunday voting for the opposition is increasingly in fashion among the educated youth.

“All my university classmates share the same inclination – anyone but United Russia,” said Yulia Agryzkova, an 18-year-old student at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics (HSE). “I don’t know a single person in my age group, from 18 to about 22, who is willing to vote for United Russia.”

Millions of first-time voters are eligible to take part in the State Duma elections on December 4. They are the voices of a new generation: those with no memory of the Soviet Union, but who have come of age in the relatively more prosperous era of Vladimir Putin. While their voting preferences vary, many nonetheless seem united by their distrust for the ruling party.

“I don’t have the feeling that my vote will count, unfortunately, but I think it’s better to go and show them – United Russia – that they don’t have a majority like they used to have,” said Bogdina Buvaeva, an 18-year-old law student at the Moscow State University for International Relations (MGIMO). “They don’t like the youth, and you can see [signs of] it on the internet – in blogs, Twitter, and wherever else.”

Pro-Kremlin youth activists attribute this ebb of sympathy to the regime by ongoing intense opposition-minded discussions on the internet and social networks that increasingly suck in younger users.

Maksim Rudnev, 24, a member of the United Russia’s youth movement Young Guards, said that young Russians taking up opposition voices against the authorities are doing so because it is “fashionable.”

He said he would vote for United Russia because it has in his opinion indeed transformed the country for the better. “If you compare the country today with where it was 15 years ago, you see two entirely different countries,” he said.

United Russia was created ten years ago. Since then, the money rainfall from the high oil prices have given the opportunity to improve the economic well-being of the Russians but also resulted in an increased control of the state over the economy and the political process in the country.

It has been a difficult election season for the party of power. Amidst a steady decline in its ratings, a string of public embarrassments and, in general, growing discontent over the current political situation, United Russia has never seemed quite so vulnerable. The lion’s share of criticism has come from the internet, the consummate meeting place for a generation of young, educated and increasingly disenchanted youth who voice their concerns (or the latest anti-establishment jokes) through outlets such as LiveJournal, VKontakte and Twitter.

This, however, hasn’t stopped United Russia from attempting to rally young voters. Most recently, it released a controversial online ad featuring a young woman at a polling station pulling a male interlocutor into the booth, then emerging with him, disheveled and smiling, under the slogan, “Let’s do it together.”

But campaigns such as these seem to have had little effect on young voters. And while many doubt the honesty of the upcoming elections, they nevertheless said the best way to voice their discontent is by going to the polls in support of other parties.

But while many first-time voters seem solidly against United Russia, the similarities end there. They diverge on a range of other issues – the parties they support, the primary influences on their voting choice, and their opinions of Russian democracy – and cast the image of the oft-heralded “young liberal voter” in a more complex light. Many are frustrated, but while some vote with economic interests in mind, others vote in line with their family’s political leanings. Still more are torn between parties, or about whether to vote at all.

Yevgeniy Popov, 22, said he would vote for the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR), headed by the notoriously vocal Vladimir Zhirinovsky, because he feels that job opportunities in Moscow have been drastically limited by the influx of migrant workers. LDPR has increasingly taken up the anti-immigration mantle, and its posters can be found around Moscow emblazoned with Zhirinovsky’s face and the slogan “For Russians!”

“It’s becoming more difficult for people who live in Moscow to find good work,” he said. “And LDPR promises to deal with this issue.”

Popov, a student at the Moscow State Road-Transport Institute, said his professors at the university influenced his decision to vote in the upcoming elections. By explaining to him the “mechanism,” he said, by which his otherwise uncounted vote would likely end up going to another party, they emphasized the importance – no matter how seemingly futile – of voting.

Others seem to follow the family trend, despite the widely perceived generational gap between the Soviet and post-Soviet generations. Agryzkova, a journalism student at HSE, said she would vote for the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF), and although she was leaning toward voting for Yabloko, a social liberal party once popular in the Yeltsin era, her family’s tradition of supporting communists won her over. She also believes the KPRF, Russia’s second most popular party, is the only viable challenger to United Russia.

“Throughout my childhood, my family would always tell me about how the quality of living for them [under communism] was so high,” she said. “Although I understand all the minuses, all the horrors of the socialist era, I think many people still lived very happily.”

Buvaeva, the MGIMO student, said she has also been influenced by her family. The Kalmykia native said her family’s deep-seeded distrust of the communist party, which is rooted in the Soviet regime’s mass deportation of the Kalmyk people in the early 1940s, plays a major role in both their collective memory and voting habits.

“For my family, it was a very tragic event,” she said. “We would never support the communists.”

Instead, Buvaeva said, she will likely vote for Yabloko, though she had considered spoiling her ballot to ensure her vote “wouldn’t be stolen.” She ultimately settled on Yabloko because it supports social programs from which she said her native village in Kalmykia could benefit.

And if the internet is the preferred vehicle for young voters’ discontent, young United Russia supporters use it, too. LiveJournal blogger tih0n, identified in his profile as Tihon Chumakov, 24, congratulated the ruling party on December 1 for its 10-year anniversary, echoing Rudnev’s sentiment that the party has played a major role in revitalizing Russia.

“Those who falsely slander United Russia either don’t understand [the improvements in Russia] and want an ideal model…or they are intentionally engaging in provocation,” he wrote.

Yet the party of power still commands a base of young voters, some of whom belong to one of several pro-Kremlin youth movements, among them Nashi (“Ours”) and Molodaya Gvardia (“Young Guard”), United Russia’s young wing. Nashi plans to gather up to 15,000 youngsters in Moscow, starting on election day and lasting through December 6, “whose lives have experienced positive changes during the years of the ruling tandem and United Russia,” according to a press release on its website.

If there is a second prominent trend among young voters, it is perhaps a sense of resignation over what they feel is a limited range of choice in the electoral landscape. It is a sort of dangerous apathy, a degree of which has always lingered in the minds of young voters in Russia, whether during the chaotic democracy of the 1990s or today. Due in most part to their mistrust of the authorities, many believe that the fate of the elections and other participating parties will be decided in the Kremlin, and not at polling stations.

Pyotr Baranov, a 21-year-old student at Moscow State University, said he and his peers are discouraged by what they feel is a largely staged competition in which their voices matter little. It is a sentiment echoed by Buvaeva and many of her friends, as well.

“If there was an option to vote against all of them, I would vote against all,” Baranov said. “I just don’t see any party that’s determined to develop things, or any with its own ideas. They’re all playing their little games with one another, and not one of them has a united and justified position.”

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