On October 30th 2016, a presidential election was held in Moldova. Igor Dodon from the pro-Russian Party of Socialists of the Republic of Moldova (PSRM) received 47.98 per cent of the vote in the first round, while the pro-Western candidate, Maia Sandu from the Action and Solidarity Party (a newly founded, centre-right and pro-Western party), received 38.71 per cent. The third candidate – pro-Russian Dumitru Ciubasenco from Our Party, received 6.03 per cent of the vote. The remaining six candidates received insignificant support from the voters. The turnout was 49.18 per cent of the eligible voters.

Following the October 16th parliamentary election in Montenegro, in which Milo Djukanović’s Democratic Party of Socialists (DPS) won 36 of the 81 seats, it appears that the DPS will form a government, subject to a coalition agreement being reached. The party had the largest share of the vote, though the margin of their victory was not sufficient to gain a majority that would allow them to govern alone. Thus negotiations between the DPS and a number of ethnic minority parties are ongoing, and it is likely that a governing coalition will be forged in the coming days. The job of leading the government will, however, now fall to Montenegro’s prime minister-designate, Duško Marković, the former head of Montenegrin state security and a close ally of Djukanović.

On October 8th, Georgia hosted a parliamentary election. The ruling Georgian Dream party supported by local tycoon Bidzina Ivanishvili, received 48.68 per cent of the vote, while the leading oppositional force the United National Movement received 27.11 per cent. The third party entering the parliament is the Patriotic Alliance, with 5.01 per cent of the vote. On October 30th, in some districts, the second round of votes will take place to elect majoritarian MPs.

Belarus, often called “the last dictatorship of Europe,” is a truly remarkable country in political terms. There are few other places where elections are rigged in such an open way and where, for over 12 years, opposition politicians have not set foot in the parliament. However, the latest parliamentary election in Belarus has brought some surprising results. Two opposition politicians were elected, among the other 108, to the Belarusian House of Representatives. Even more surprising is the gender of the selected politicians, as they are both women.

Montenegrin politics has been dominated by the Democratic Party of Socialists (DPS), the successors of the Montenegrin League of Communists (SKCG), since the former Yugoslav republic’s first multi-party elections in 1990. The party’s leading figure, Milo Djukanović, has held the position of either prime minster or president (excluding two short sabbaticals) constantly since then. The latest elections promised to be the most closely contested since Montenegro regained its independence in 2006. And while the DPS’s hold on power had been relatively stable since (though coalition agreements were needed to ensure this), the striking difference in the latest parliamentary election was that the DPS were contesting them independently (not in a pre-election coalition), as were their partners in the governing coalition created after the 2012 election. The outcome of the vote was, therefore, rather unpredictable.

In a month, the Russian parliament will be elected through a new mixed electoral system. The last three State Duma assemblies can hardly be characterised as democratic, and it remains to be seen if this election will bring any changes.

Over the past few years, the Russian authorities have been gradually rolling out a strategy for managing the upcoming State Duma election. What are the elements of this strategy, and will it help the Kremlin achieve its objectives? Like most modern authoritarian regimes which organise elections, the regime in Russia aspires to be viewed as broadly legitimate while keeping political pluralism highly constrained. These two objectives, evidently, are difficult to reconcile. In order to increase legitimacy, the regime allows more electoral competition, but at the same time it has an incentive to minimise competition, to which end it resorts to heavy-handed tactics including fraud, undermining its legitimacy.