Opposition leader shakes up Moscow mayoral race
MOSCOW — A motley gaggle of hipsters, mothers with children and two babushkas with hair dyed bright red gather to listen to something they haven’t heard in more than a decade: a stump speech for Moscow mayor.
Alexei Navalny, ananti- corruption blogger who has become the best known face of Russia’s protest movement, is trying to take his following off-line and into the street, waging a traditional campaign of hand-shaking and leaflet drives to win voters outside his base. Navalny has little hope of defeating incumbent Sergei Sobyanin, but polls show his star is rising. And if he gets a big chunk of the vote, the Kremlin will face pressure to show leniency over his fiveyear prison sentence.
Sobyanin, meanwhile, is playing the regal incumbent: Throughout the campaign, the Kremlin-backed politician has been all but invisible, allowing the constant drone of jackhammers or whiff of fresh paint that are signs of a Moscow makeover to remind voters of who’s in charge — and who can pull the purse-strings.
Navalny, though, has been soaking up attention, and generating
“Can you name a single major business that’s been built in this country in the past 10 years? I can’t!”
ALEXEI NAVALNY
buzz. On a recent August day, the opposition leader stood on stage in a sprawling Moscow park dotted with enormous space shuttles and other scraps of Soviet-era glory, and attempted to connect with an audience he rarely reaches through Twitter: the feared and revered babushka contingency.
“We know that (in Soviet times) our oil money was spent on enormous factories, industry, railroads, roads, science, health care, rockets,” he boomed, riffing on a nostalgia felt by many older Russians, who saw their hopes dashed under post- Soviet political reforms. “But can you name a single major business that’s been built in this country in the past 10 years? I can’t!”
The old ladies sitting in the first row chuckled and shook their heads.
Polling data on the race is spotty and inconsistent, but the trends are clear: The number of Muscovites ready to vote for Navalny on Sept. 8 has breached 10 per cent and may even be moving toward 20 per cent.
Meanwhile, Sobyanin’s ratings — while still above the 50 per cent that would allow him to avoid a run-off — are slipping by the week.
Last month, Navalny was sentenced to five years in prison on embezzlement charges, but was released the day after his conviction in what many have described as an effort to legitimize the mayoral race and ensure that Sobyanin — who was appointed as mayor and is seen as a possible successor to Putin — is regarded as an elected politician with widespread support.