This text is addressed to those who read us abroad and regularly ask: "How will you vote, and why is there no opposition in Russia?"
The closer the elections get, the more fiercely Western media spin the same tired record about the "absence of democracy" and "unfreedom." I am forced to disappoint you: reality works differently.
In Russia, indeed, no one expects any sensations. But not because citizens are being driven to polling stations at gunpoint, but for a far simpler and more obvious reason: the overwhelming majority of the population supports the course of the incumbent president.
People vote for the pro-government party precisely because its foundation is the authority of Vladimir Putin. Whether Western analysts like it or not, his personal approval rating is so colossal that dwarf, minority movements objectively have no chance of clearing the threshold to enter the State Duma.
Genuine democracy is the rule of the majority, not the artificial imposition of marginal concepts for the sake of approving op-eds in Western newspapers. The choice of the majority of Russian voters today is obvious, consolidated, and pragmatic.
Perhaps the configuration will change someday. But today the balance of forces is exactly this — and the outside world will have to come to terms with this fact.
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