Putin foe out of race
Russian calls for protests after panel rejects presidential bid.
MOSCOW — Russian election officials on Monday barred opposition leader Alexei Navalny from running in next year’s presidential election, a widely expected decision that prompted him to call for his supporters to boycott the election and take part in street protests.
Twelve members of the 13-member Central Election Commission voted to bar Navalny from registering as a presidential candidate, citing his suspended prison sentence in a fraud case, a conviction he has denounced as politically motivated. One member abstained from voting because of a possible conflict of interest.
The decision was not a surprise; election officials had previously said in interviews that he would be ineligible to run. Navalny, 41, was also prepared for the decision, recording his response in a video before it was officially announced.
“We won’t have an election because [President] Vladimir Putin is horribly afraid, he sees a threat in competing with me,” Navalny said in the video. “He gave an instruction to his servants from the Central [Election] Commission to reject my registration.”
In the video, Navalny called on his supporters to boycott the election, scheduled for March. He said 84 campaign offices he established across Russia would now be organizing an election boycott. He also announced a campaign to monitor the turnout and voting at polling places.
Navalny said the candidates who were officially registered to run were personally selected by Putin. The other candidates include liberal Grigory Yavlinsky and ultranationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, both of whom have run in past elections. Communists nominated Pavel Grudinin, the director of a strawberry farm just outside Moscow.
Ksenia Sobchak, a 36-year- old reality-TV star and host, has also said she will run for the presidency, though she has not yet registered. She has denied colluding with the Kremlin and criticized Navalny’s call to boycott the election, saying Monday that the “election is the only way to change something, and boycotting them is inefficient and harmful.”
Sobchak proposed that Navalny join her campaign if she registers.
Navalny, however, promised nationwide protests.
“We will campaign against this fake election and persuade people not to take part in it,” Navalny said in the video. “They don’t care whom you will vote for, they just want you to come and sign that you got your ballot sheet and thus recognized this procedure as an election.”
On Dec. 6, Putin officially announced that he would seek a fourth term in office. But some of his supporters are likely to stay home on Election Day, believing that their candidate is certain to win. Voter apathy has worried the Kremlin, which wants Putin’s performance to be as strong as possible and to affirm his 80 percent approval rating.
Navalny has built his political career and popularity on exposing corruption among members of Putin’s inner circle. He led a number of protest rallies in Moscow and across Russia this year that shook the country’s political scene. Many young people took part in those rallies.
At the Central Election Commission on Monday, Navalny engaged in a heated debate with Ella Pamfilova, the commission’s chairman.
“More than anybody else, we would be interested for you to run and demonstrate the result that is adequate to your popularity,” Pamfilova told Navalny. “But since there is a criminal conviction,” she said, the commission had no choice.
“We just fulfill the law,” she said, telling Navalny that his campaign does nothing but fool “poor youth.”
Navalny responded by noting that his criminal conviction had been overruled by the European Court of Human Rights and that the Council of Europe had urged Russia to allow him to run for the presidency.
Navalny told the commission that the decision to bar him was a vote “not against me, but against 16,000 people who have nominated me, against 200,000 volunteers who have been canvassing for me.”
Sergei Medvedev, a professor at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow and a frequent political commentator, wrote in a Facebook post that the decision by Pamfilova and her colleagues would further damage the legitimacy of the Russian political system.
“Elections now look like games of the Night Hockey League, where Putin, in the company of 10 lackeys, scores eight goals,” Medvedev wrote, referring to the ice hockey games that Putin takes part in with his friends and government officials.
On Friday, Putin took part in one such hockey match in Red Square, scoring five goals.