Superwahljahr 2024: What to Watch Following Russia’s Presidential “Election”

There is a sense of inevitability regarding the outcome of Russia’s looming presidential election: Vladimir Putin is poised to win a fifth term as President, which will allow him to remain in power until at least 2030. Despite the ongoing war in Ukraine, he appears to have just as strong a grip on Russia as at any time over the past 24 years. Any opposition figures who could have challenged him have been imprisoned or exiled abroad. Independent media outlets that could show criticism of Putin’s policies have been blocked. Some analysts have argued that the 2024 Russian presidential “election” is more heavily manipulated than any other election in Russia’s post-Soviet history and that the death of Alexei Navalny has intensified the atmosphere of fear in which the vote is taking place.

Although the Kremlin maintains rigid control over the political system and the electoral process in a country of nearly 150 million, the election is the largest public test of the Russian state’s ability to shape its desired result at home since Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Join the American Council on Germany for a discussion about the political landscape in Russia with Dr. Sabine Fischer, Senior Fellow at the German Institute for International and Security Studies (Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik, SWP) in Berlin, and Dr. Angela Stent (1982 Young Leader), Senior Adviser to the Center for Eurasian, Russian, and East European Studies at Georgetown University, where she is also Professor Emerita of Government and Foreign Service.

Dr. Sabine Fischer is a Senior Fellow at the German Institute for International and Security Studies (Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik, SWP) in Berlin. Her research focuses on Russian foreign policy and domestic politics, EU-Russia relations, EU policy towards Russia/the EU’s eastern neighborhood, and unresolved conflicts in the region.

From 2019 to 2021, Dr. Fischer worked in Moscow as a Team Leader of the Public Diplomacy. EU and Russia project. Previously, Dr. Fischer was the Head of the Eastern Europe and Eurasia Research Division at SWP (2012-2018) and a Senior Research Fellow at the European Union Institute for Security Studies in Paris (2007-2012). At the EUISS she was responsible for research and policy on Russia and Eurasia for the EU institutions. Before that, she worked at the Freie Universität Berlin, the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research, and the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt. She holds a PhD from the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main.

Dr. Angela Stent (1982 ACG Young Leader) is Senior Adviser to the Center for Eurasian, Russian, and East European Studies at Georgetown University, where she is also Professor Emerita of Government and Foreign Service. She is also a nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and co-chairs its Hewett Forum on Post-Soviet Affairs. From 2004 to 2006, she served as national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia at the National Intelligence Council. From 1999 to 2001, she served in the Office of Policy Planning at the U.S. Department of State.

Dr. Stent’s publications include: “From Embargo to Ostpolitik: The Political Economy of West German-Soviet Relations, 1955-1980” (Cambridge University Press, 1981); “Russia and Germany Reborn: Unification, The Soviet Collapse and The New Europe” (Princeton University Press, 1999); “The Limits of Partnership: US-Russian Relations in the Twenty-First Century” (Princeton University Press, 2014), for which she won the American Academy of Diplomacy’s Douglas Dillon prize for the best book on the practice of American Diplomacy. Her most recent book is “Putin’s World: Russia Against the West and With the Rest” (Twelve Books, 2019) for which she won the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy’s prize for the best book on U.S-Russian Relations.

She was a member of the senior advisory panel for NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander in Europe for Admiral James Stavridis and General Philip Breedlove. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She is a contributing editor to Survival and is on the editorial boards of the Journal of Cold War Studies, World Policy Journal, Internationale Politik, and Mirovaia Ekonomika i Mezhdunarodnie Otnosheniie. She has served on the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council for Russia and Central Asia. She was a trustee of the Eurasia Foundation. Dr. Stent received her bachelor’s from Cambridge University, her Master of Science with distinction from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and her master’s and doctorate from Harvard University.