this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2025
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Archive: https://archive.is/2025.04.11-035932/https://meduza.io/en/feature/2025/04/10/a-russian-nostradamus-to-rival-the-simpsons

LDPR has been without its charismatic, foul-mouthed founder for three years. Kremlin strategists are doing everything they can to hide Zhirinovsky’s absence from voters.

(…) The right-wing, misleadingly named Liberal Democratic Party of Russia has been without its founder for more than three years now. Vladimir Zhirinovsky died in April 2022, and polling data published by the Kremlin-linked sociological institutes All-Russian Center for the Study of Public Opinion (VTsIOM) and Public Opinion Foundation (FOM) show that his death actually had a positive effect on the party’s popularity: LDPR’s candidates are now (slightly) outperforming candidates from the Communist Party (KPRF).

While Zhirinovsky was alive, his party almost never placed second in national politics, and the same was true for its performance in regional elections. The current success is paradoxical: Aside from its founder, the party has had neither prominent figures nor a clear ideology that appealed to voters. LDPR campaigns were built entirely around Zhirinovsky’s theatrics, and his name always led the party's ballot lists, even in local municipal elections.

Liberal Democrats owe their party’s survival and recent electoral good fortune to the Kremlin’s support and the continued use of Zhirinovsky’s image in campaign materials. The Putin administration had time to preparefor this transition: Zhirinovsky’s death became an imminent concern in early February 2022 when he was hospitalized with COVID-19 and placed in a medically induced coma a few days later. With LDPR’s irreplaceable leader on life support, officials started looking for a successor. (…)

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