(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- Now that he’s been officially barred from challenging Russian President Vladimir Putin in presidential elections next March, opposition leader Alexey Navalny is counting on becoming an even bigger nuisance for the Kremlin. The 41-year-old Navalny, who is banned from appearing on state television and whose name Putin never even mentions in public, is urging his supporters to protest nationwide on Jan. 28 as part of a campaign to boycott the vote.
“Going to vote now just means fixing Putin's problems by helping him disguise his reappointment as something that looks like an election,” Navalny wrote on his blog after Russia’s Central Election Commission refused to register him as a candidate due to a fraud conviction that Navalny denounces as politically motivated. In a video, he accused Putin of being “afraid of running against me.”
While Navalny likely wouldn’t come close to winning, his mere presence as a candidate poses other risks to the 65-year-old Putin, who is vying for a final six-year term as president and is about to become the longest-serving Russian leader since Josef Stalin. As a presidential candidate, Navalny would be guaranteed airtime on state TV, taking his allegations of rampant corruption beyond his Internet audience and into the homes of millions of Russians who rely on state broadcasters for information. “Having Navalny take part in the elections would be a huge negative,” said Evgeny Minchenko, a Moscow political consultant who advises the government. “He would have used the electoral campaign to attack Putin and his team.”
Even though Navalny is seen as having zero chance of triggering a second round of voting, a strong showing would still cause problems. “Navalny in theory could get second place in the election, which for the Kremlin would be uncomfortable,” said Mikhail Vinogradov, head of the St. Petersburg Politics Foundation.
Navalny was a thorn in Putin’s side the last time he ran for president. The lawyer-turned-activist was a key organizer of the wave of demonstrations that erupted over alleged ballot-rigging in 2011 and 2012. He showed his potential in 2013 when he won 27 percent of the votes in the Moscow mayoral election, almost enough to force a run-off against a Putin ally, Sergei Sobyanin.
Yet a poll published in early December by the independent Levada Center research group showed that Navalny was on track to pick up only 2 percent of the vote nationwide among those planning to cast their ballots, vs. 67 percent for Putin. Two other politicians, nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky and Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov, who both have the advantage Navalny doesn’t of regular appearances on state television, would get 4 percent each, according to the survey.
That may be a sign the Kremlin is making a mistake by overestimating Navanly’s ability to translate protests into votes. “The ban on Navalny participating in the election is a blessing in disguise for him,” says Boris Makarenko, an analyst at the Moscow-based Center for Political Technologies. Although he has a sizable and loyal following, Navalny has struggled to build the kind of political alliances that are necessary to perform well in elections, including falling out with such allies as former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov. A poor performance in an election could risk damaging his credibility, said Makarenko.
In 2017, Navalny staged the biggest protests in five years as tens of thousands of mainly young people heeded his calls to rally across Russia in March and June. He has also spent time traveling across Russia, including embarking on a regional tour last spring of far-flung areas such as Siberia.
The mass arrests that have followed protests appear to have tamped down Russians’ enthusiasm for unrest. Rallies held by Navalny on Putin's birthday in October attracted just a fraction of the estimated 60,000 who came out last spring and 75,000 in the summer. The October rally drew just 1,000 protestors in Moscow, almost as many people as were detained in the capital city during both of the protests in March and June.
Russians are also feeling a bit better about the economy. After the longest recession in two decades, provoked by a plunge in oil prices and Western sanctions, growth sputtered back to life in 2017, though it is expected to remain stuck below 2 percent. Putin remains popular despite increasing comparisons to the era of stagnation under Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev.
Pro-democracy campaigner Alexander Soloviev, head of the Open Russia foundation financed by exiled businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky, says he doesn't expect major unrest after the vote, unlike what happened in 2011, when Putin confronted the biggest protests of his 18-year rule. “People are used to thieves being in power who falsify elections, and they don't believe they can change anything,” said Soloviev.
As part of their strategy, Kremlin authorities are counting on socialite and reality-TV star Ksenia Sobchak, a sometime vocal Putin critic who's been handpicked to run for president, to win some of his support, according to a person close to the Kremlin. Navalny has denounced Sobchak, the daughter of Putin's political mentor, Anatoly Sobchak, for being a “caricature liberal candidate.” She maintains that her presidential bid is genuine.
Still, Navalny campaigners have managed to set up 84 regional offices with 200,000 volunteers across the world's largest country by landmass, despite battling repeated arrests and official harassment. They say 16,000 people gathered in 20 cities on Dec. 24 to officially support Navalny's candidacy, and maintain they’ll do everything to depress the turnout and rob Putin of a legitimate victory. “No one will recognize the election process or the results,” Navalny told the central electoral commission when it announced the decision to bar him on Dec. 25.
At his annual press conference in mid-December, Putin accused Navalny (without identifying him by name) of dangerous radicalism. Putin defended the decision to keep Navalny out of political life by comparing him to former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, who in 2003 spearheaded the first so-called post-Soviet color revolution among former Soviet nations and who is now an opposition figure in Ukraine. “Do you want such Saakashvilis to destabilize your country? To survive attempted coups? We have been through this already. Do you want all this to return?” Putin said.
While the outcome of the election isn’t in doubt, what is less clear is the longer-term impact on the stability of Putin’s rule, said one of Navalny’s top advisers, Vladimir Ashurkov, who's based in London. “Nobody has a crystal ball,” he said. “Nobody was predicting those protests in December 2011, and nobody was predicting such a big turnout in March and June.”
To contact the author of this story: Henry Meyer in Moscow at hmeyer4@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Matthew Philips at mphilips3@bloomberg.net.
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