Navalny: I’ll prove that Putin’s claims of voter support don’t add up
Russian opposition leader plans ‘voter strike’ in more than 90 cities as part of election boycott campaign
For the past year Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader, has been criss-crossing Russia on a self-proclaimed presidential campaign against Vladimir Putin, who is seeking re-election in March after 18 years in power. Now, he is campaigning against the election itself.
After Mr Navalny was banned from running late last month, the rabblerousing lawyer declared a boycott intended to expose the vote as a farce.
It is a tactic that could worry the Kremlin after polls predicted a record low election turnout, which would undermine Mr Putin’s claim of having overwhelming support for a fourth term. Mr Navalny is planning to hold rallies for a “voter strike” in more than 90 cities on Jan 28.
“The goal is to convince everyone that this is not an election but a reappointment; to create low turnout and strike an additional blow to the legitimacy of the regime and Putin,” Mr Navalny told The Daily Telegraph. He claimed the 65-year-old president was seeking to remain in power as “tsar” for the rest of his life.
Mr Navalny’s campaign also said it had recruited 20,000 election observers to prevent officials from falsifying the turnout in far-flung regions under pressure to produce a Kremlin victory.
During regional elections in September, Reuters filmed a man who said he was from the ruling United Russia party stuffing ballots into a voting urn in Ossetia. The polling place later reported seven times more votes than Reuters reporters counted.
To boycott or not to boycott is a question that has tormented Russia’s marginalised liberal opposition, which lacks the support of large state enterprises and state television.
Mr Navalny himself called on Russians to “vote for any party against United Russia” in 2011. Ksenia Sobchak, the opposition journalist whose presidential campaign is seen by many as a Kremlin ploy, said Mr Navalny’s call to boycott was an “ineffective and harmful method” that would only increase Mr Putin’s result.
The presidential race is winner-take-all, and Mr Putin is all but guaranteed victory by a wide margin. A poll published by the independent Levada Centre in December found that 61 per cent of voters would vote for him.
Mr Navalny claimed that this popularity was inflated by the lack of a real alternative. “They show the great Putin and these funny Lilliputians next to him. Of course people will vote for him,” he said. His idea is that a boycott
‘Low voter turnout will contribute to this picture of a declining autumnal autocracy, an ageing regime’
could reveal some of the discontent beneath the surface. Real incomes have been falling for years, and the economy has shown only minimal growth after a recession in 2015 and 2016.
“I can say as a person who [campaigned] throughout the whole country, and went to pro-putin places … Putin has no iron support in these regions. There is only poverty and hopelessness,” Mr Navalny said.
Voters are showing little interest in the pre-determined election: the Levada Centre found that only 52 per cent of those eligible planned to vote in March, the lowest in any presidential election in post-soviet Union Russia. If Mr Navalny can cut into that further, it would be an embarrassment for the Kremlin. Either way, he can claim credit for the expected lacklustre turnout even as Mr Putin attains victory.
“Low voter turnout will contribute to this picture of a declining autumnal autocracy, an ageing regime that cannot count on people’s active support but only on their tacit compliance,” said Yekaterina Schulmann, an analyst.
Few expect new mass protests after the election, such as those sparked by widespread falsifications in the 2011 parliamentary elections. Then again, few expected the demonstrations in 80 cities that Mr Navalny held in March, after a video he made about alleged corruption by Dmitry Medvedev, the prime minister, went viral. That movement fizzled out after follow-up rallies in June and October, but Mr Navalny denied he had missed his chance to change the country.
“If we didn’t achieve something it’s because we didn’t work hard enough or the time wasn’t right,” he said. “We need to be innovative. I see that the truth is on our side.”
♦ Two masked men set fire to the office of one of Russia’s biggest human rights groups yesterday. Memorial’s building in Nazran, in the region of Ingushetia, which borders Chechnya, was attacked in the early hours. It came days after Oyub Titiyev, the head of its operations in Chechnya, was arrested on disputed drug charges.