The Kremlin has approved the “candidate” list for those that will run against Russian President Vladimir Putin in the 2024 presidential elections. The list has no young people on it, and none of them is expected to come anywhere close to winning, reported Meduza on August 29.

Putin has already served the two terms he is allowed to serve under the Russian constitution. However, after changes to the basic law were rammed through in July 2020, the term-clock was reset, allowing Putin to run for new fresh terms in office that could leave him in power until 2036, when he would be 83 and the longest-serving Moscow leader since the days of the Russian empire.

Putin has yet to confirm whether he will stand in the elections slated for March 17 next year, but with a war on he is widely expected to hang on to power for at least one more term.

The forthcoming 2024 election in Russia is shaping up to be a carefully orchestrated affair, with age being a pivotal factor in candidate selection.

According Meduza’s insider sources, Deputy Chief of Staff Sergey Kiriyenko and his domestic policy team have drawn up a list of who will stand against the incumbent Putin. The criteria used to vet potential candidates, often referred to as Putin's "sparring partners," includes age as a key consideration.

To ensure continuity and avoid unsettling voters, the Kremlin has deliberately excluded politicians under the age of 50 from the nomination process, reports Meduza.

The rationale is that the presence of a younger candidate on the ballot might raise doubts about whether the 70-year-old Putin remains the same leader "who came to power with a firm hand."

Putin will be running against candidates from the so-called “systemic opposition” that are nominally independent, but usually toe the Kremlin’s line on all major policy decisions. That includes: Communist Party, the far-right Liberal-Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR), and the centrist New People party.

The previously liberal opposition party, A Just Russia–For Truth, has decided to endorse Putin rather than nominate its own candidate.

It is not clear if Russia's “non-systemic” opposition – true opposition parties – will field candidates as most of its prominent leaders are either in exile or in jail. The last of the recognisable opposition leaders, Ilya Yashin, who refused to flee the country, was sentenced to eight and half years in jail in December 2022 on charges of spreading “disinformation about the army” after he condemned the massacre of Ukrainian civilians by the Russian armed forces in the Ukrainian town of Bucha.

The focus on predictable candidates is in keeping with the Kremlin's goal of securing Putin's re-election with a high voter turnout and a record-breaking margin. While Putin enjoys genuine support and would likely win an open and fair election, in the Russian system it is the elite he needs to convince, and they want to see him in absolute control. Typically, the results are massaged so that Putin wins just over 50% of the entire number of eligible voters in the country, which translates into scores of more than two thirds of the actual votes cast.

The Communist Party (KPRF) plans to nominate its long-standing leader Gennady Zyuganov again, who has been a veteran of Russian politics since the 1990s but has lost all relevance in the last two decades. He is seen as a known entity and unlikely to disrupt the election process. Zyuganov's consistent performance in previous elections where he typically takes around 15% of the vote – enough to legitimise the elections, but not enough to threaten Putin – is seen as bringing an element of predictability to the proceedings.

Moreover, the KPRF won’t rock the boat in the face of massive vote rigging. In the September 2021 Duma elections, the KPRF won a huge majority over the Kremlin’s puppet party, the ruling United Russia, according to exit polls in what was seen as a protest vote. But that result was overturned after the results of electronic votes came in, delivering United Russia victories in most regions. The overturn was most noticeable in Moscow, where almost all the districts had delivered a victory to KPRF before the electronic results were counted, after which KPRF lost in all of them. As bne IntelliNews reported, a statistical study of the voting patterns showed clearly that the result had been massively falsified.

Despite the obvious and demonstrable cheating Zhuganov decided not to complain and neither challenged the result legally nor called on the KPRF’s millions of supporters to demonstrate against the results.

The 2021 Duma elections are seen as a wet run for the upcoming presidential elections, where the new electronic voting system was rolled out for the first time in 17 of Russia’s 49 regions and is inscrutable. Russia also does not allow international independent election observers in its elections and independent domestic election observers are also widely prevented from working using bureaucratic means.

The LDPR has lost its charismatic leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who died in April 2022 and had been a staple of Russian domestic politics. Loud and abrasive, he was a useful magnet for right-wing nationalist voters, but widely seen as totally loyal to the Kremlin during votes on the floor of the Duma. During the 2021 Duma elections, it appears that the LDPR results were massaged upwards to ensure it had a sufficiently large bloc to win some committee chairman seats, which gives the semblance of debate and democracy in the parliament.

In the upcoming elections the LDPR is expected to nominate its new leader Leonid Slutsky, leveraging his penchant for publicity to increase his visibility during the campaign. The selection of candidates like Slutsky, who possess established public profiles, is in keeping with the Kremlin's strategy to maintain control over the election narrative and minimise surprises. As a result, issues like the wisdom of perpetrating a war in Ukraine will not enter the debate.

For the New People party the nomination is less clear, says Meduza. The Kremlin appears to favour party leader Alexey Nechayev due to his serious demeanour, although Nechayev himself seems uninterested in running. The party's preference for candidates with gravitas and decorum stems from the desire to avoid candidates who could potentially threaten Putin's electoral performance.

The age factor also comes into play in candidate selection. Younger candidates, such as Duma deputy Vladislav Davankov, a former Moscow mayor candidate, are excluded from consideration due to concerns that their presence might draw attention to Putin's age.

As Putin gets visibly older as he enters into his third decade in power, Russians will start to question whether it's time for a younger leader. Indeed, at the last presidential election the share of those that said they were ready for a fresh face was growing, but not in the majority yet. The Kremlin aims to avoid any contrast between Putin and energetic, younger candidates. A May 2023 poll revealed that respondents frequently cited "age" as one of their concerns about Putin's leadership, reports Meduza.