In the Siberian region of Krasnoyarsk, political activists are raffling a car, while in the southern Russian city of Krasnodar, the prize is an iPhone X. In Berdsk, the best selfie will be plastered across a billboard. The catch? To qualify for a chance to win, Russians must turn out to vote.

There is little doubt that Vladimir Putin will win a fourth term as president in the election next Sunday, making him the first Kremlin leader since Stalin to serve two decades in power.

But in an uncontested political field, the Kremlin is worried about turnout. And with concerns that Putin’s appeal alone may not be enough to get out the vote, officials across the country are experimenting with raffles, competitions and the occasional referendum – like one in Volgograd that asks voters whether they want to change time zones – all in an effort to ensure Putin wins with greater support than in 2012.

“I think a good result for Putin would be him beating his 2012 results,” said Valery Fyodorov, the head of a leading state-owned polling agency, VCIOM, who regularly presents the results of his polling at the Kremlin. Sixty-five per cent of voters turned out in 2012, with 63.6% supporting Putin.

An election campaign billboard promoting presidential candidate for the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF), Pavel Grudinin. Photograph: Kirill Kukhmar/TASS

“My understanding is that the administration wants to pull, not push, people to these elections,” Fyodorov said. “And that means not using punishments or threats, but bringing people out to vote with better messaging and, yes, some selfie contests and referendums to raise interest.”

The 2018 election may already go down as one of Russia’s most bizarre and inert. The president can’t be bothered to star in his own campaign adverts, the Communist party’s candidate, Pavel Grudunin, is a millionaire and former member of the ruling party, some Putin opponents consulted the Kremlin before announcing their presidential bids, and the most prominent opposition politician in the country – Alexei Navalny – has been barred from running.

At Putin’s first campaign event, at Moscow’s Luzhniki stadium on Saturday, some organisers padded out the crowds with paid attendees. The country’s hockey league delayed the first round of its playoffs so that players could appear on stage with Putin.

And yet, despite the obvious staging of elements of this campaign, insiders, pollsters, political commentators and opposition members say the government’s legitimacy is on the line.

“Turnout is a measure of the public’s support,” said Evgeny Roizmann, mayor of Yekaterinburg, the country’s fourth largest city. A rare public opponent of Putin in Russia’s heartland, Roizmann has said he will not vote.

The Kremlin must walk a tightrope in this election: garnering enough support to confirm its validity, while avoiding the kinds of strong-arm tactics that prompted widespread anti-government protests after parliamentary elections in 2011. And to achieve that, authorities aim to create a “holiday-like atmosphere” on voting day.

Motoriststs pass a poster announcing the forthcoming elections, in central Moscow Photograph: Mladen Antonov/AFP/Getty Images

The first step in the campaign to get out the vote came last May when members of the State Duma moved the election date to 18 March. That day will mark the fourth anniversary of the signing of a treaty to annex Crimea, a milestone in Putin’s third term that pushed his nominal approval ratings above 80%.

On election day, residents of the oil-rich Siberian city of Tyumen will enjoy a massive spring festival to help get people to the polls. Young Muscovites who vote will have a chance to win tickets to a “super-show” featuring the entertainer Timati and the Georgian rapper L’One. And across the Russia’s nine time zones, parents will be asked to vote in referendums on the timings of school holidays.

There has been minimal pushback. The central elections committee has opposed a number of official referendums that had been scheduled for the same day as the elections, although its head, Ella Pamfilova, gave her OK to the selfie contests, telling a late-night TV host: “By all means admire yourself but wait until the voting is over so that it isn’t considered to be campaigning.”

Ballots are handed over to Crimean regional election commissions at the Tavrida printing office Photograph: TASS/Barcroft Images

Authorities are particularly worried about turnout among young people. A series of anonymously backed election material has targeted them on social media, including a homophobic YouTube clip warning that Russia could become gay-friendly if voters don’t vote, and a nebulous movement called “Putin Team” that has attracted the support of celebrities such as Alexander Ovechkin, an ice hockey player, and Sergey Karjakin, a chess grandmaster.

But some tactics have prompted a backlash. A series of illustrated images of pin-up models featured in the Russian edition of Maxim magazine’s “Only for Adults” group on Vkontakte, Russia’s version of Facebook, were aimed at getting young men to the polls.

“The idea is that there are some things you can only do when you’re 18: get married, drive a car, have sex, join the army – and vote,” Alexander Malenkov, the editor-in-chief of Maxim magazine, told the Guardian by phone, adding that it was aimed at young people in the 18-24 bracket who have never voted before.

Malenkov refused to say who ordered the images, which were marketed as “stickers” that could be shared with friends, or how much they paid for the campaign. But he said he had tasked a team of 10 editors to produce content for the group, which has amassed 430,000 members.

The images prompted a minor political scandal, partly because they seemed a particularly ham-fisted way to court the male youth vote and partly because the images appear to have been plagiarised.

“We can’t even have election stickers without falsifications,” went one joke shared online among opposition members.

Malenkov said the backlash against the “Only for Adults” message in the last week had shown that a key controversy in 2018 was not whether to vote for or against Putin, but whether to vote at all.

“We’re just supporting the idea of going to vote and having a civic stance, which is a good thing,” Malenkov said. “But in today’s situation, going to the elections is the same as going to elect Putin. Everyone understands this … Elections have become a kind of ritual and people are accusing us of supporting that ritual.”

So far, the person who seemed least enthused by the campaign was Putin himself, who until the stadium rally this month had barely altered his routine of visits to factories and local governments around Russia.



“He is not that interested in the campaign,” a person close to the Kremlin said in the early stages of his re-election bid. “He expects his subordinates to make sure that everything goes smoothly. And if it doesn’t, then they’ll shoulder the blame.”

• This article was amended on 21 March 2018. An earlier version said Yekaterinburg was the third largest city. It is the fourth.