LETTER FROM MOSCOW

On that November day in the Kremlin, Ella Pamfilova may have been overcome by emotion. The chair of Russia's Central Electoral Commission (CEC) was speaking before her hero, Vladimir Putin, who had just awarded her the medal "for services to the nation." She enthused: "We have set up one of the most modern electoral systems in the world. The most open and transparent, even... I can't think of any equivalent in the world."

Pamfilova has a flair for grandiloquence. Indeed, the forthcoming presidential election from March 15 to 17, which she controls, is nothing short of a "historic event, on which depends not only the fate of Russia, but also that of the world." Those who dare speak of fraud are sometimes referred to as "provocateurs" or "hysterical anti-Russians," when they are not dismissed as simply "less than nothing" or "madmen," according to the expressions she has used in various interviews

Pamfilova has been head of the CEC since 2016. Theoretically, it's a technical job in the background: running nearly 100,000 polling stations across an immense territory with a bloated administration. But the former union leader loves the limelight, even at age 70. She has no qualms about coming out with shocking little phrases that appeal to the media, even if it means repeating the same skit several times.

At the end of 2017, when denying Alexei Navalny the right to run in the presidential election, Pamfilova snidely quipped to the opponent: "You're young, your future is ahead of you." She liked the phrase so much that she used it again six years later, after dismissing two candidates opposed to the war in Ukraine from the 2024 election. "You're a young woman, your future is still ahead of you," she told Yekaterina Duntsova. "You have good political prospects," she also said to 60-year-old Boris Nadezhdin. Each time, the pretext used was the same: "errors" in the candidacy application.

There's a mystery to Pamfilova's career. Before becoming a devoted soldier of the Putin regime, this woman with a perpetually weary smile was a respected human rights defender and even, for a time, an opponent of Putin. Born in Uzbekistan, in the late 1980s she was an apparatchik in the declining Soviet Union, first as a trade union leader at Moscow energy giant Mosenergo, then as a member of the Supreme Soviet.

She adapted perfectly at the turn of the 1990s, spending four years as social protection minister in the government of the very liberal Yegor Gaidar. At the time, she was also one of the few figures to voice her opposition to the war in Chechnya.

You have 48.88% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.