The results of Russia’s 2025 Single Voting Day suggest that the New People project still has not attained the status of a fully “systemic” party. Regional officials display guarded loyalty, yet the party is likely to persist as an administrative vehicle over the next five years. According to sources cited by Source, the party’s core is banking less on growing genuine voter support than on tapping administrative resources.
Party figures’ energetic PR about “successful” results, interlocutors told Source, is largely an attempt to signal to the Kremlin that New People still have untapped potential—whereas A Just Russia — For Truth (SRZP) has clearly lost ground.
Inside the Kremlin, the parliamentary parties are informally sorted into pairs: the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF) versus the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR), and New People versus SRZP. “All the narratives pushed by court political scientists were built around exactly this schema,” a political consultant noted.
Set against the public spin, the party’s real electoral gains look much more modest. In the gubernatorial races, New People barely took part. Exceptions were Orenburg Oblast and Perm Krai, where the party nominated candidates to mobilize discontented voters. But the Orenburg campaign fizzled—its candidate, sources say, avoided any criticism of the authorities.
In regional legislatures, New People won seats in most of the 11 regions that held elections, with Tambov and Belgorod the main exceptions. Even this outcome, Source’s interlocutors argue, reflects direct instructions from the Presidential Administration rather than authentic voter support.
On the ground, the party behaves with extreme caution: it avoids clashes with governors, benefits from their administrative capabilities, and engages with social discontent only selectively—typically in coordination with local authorities. The party notably stepped up activity in Chelyabinsk and, to a lesser extent, Novosibirsk—precisely where it suited regional administrations.
“New People are, in pure form, an administrative yet personalist party. They practice fragmentary politics, which prevents them from approaching the scale of CPRF or LDPR—quasi-active as those may be,” one source concluded.
The party has not resolved its internal contradictions: its position remains highly eclectic and head-in-the-sand; it still carries the reputation of being a personal instrument of Sergei Kiriyenko and the Kovalchuk network, which limits its room to maneuver and expand support; it lacks high-profile faces and suffers from a crisis of trust among activists and toward the project itself. Ultimately, the future of New People appears tied to the personal fortunes of specific Kremlin actors—an anchoring that deprives the party of stability within the existing system of power.
