Alexei Navalny, Russian opposition leader, at Central Election Commission's session which is about to deny his right to be in the ballot on the upcoming presidential elections. Photo CC BY-SA 4.0: Evgeny Feldman / Wiki Commons. Some rights reserved.Presidential elections in today’s Russia are often talked about as mere formalities, as procedures essential to maintaining a democratic façade. The outcome of the process is known to everyone in advance. In public, the only person who can doubt the outcome is the one who is actually responsible for it – Vladimir Putin, who delayed announcing his re-election bid for long enough to generate rumours about potential successors. This “modesty” is an integral part of the game: the acting and future president has to hesitate (playfully) in order for the elections to gain symbolic weight – only then to announce his candidacy over rapturous applause during a visit to Gorky Automobile Plant.
But here’s what makes the 2018 election unique: doubt over the election results, which had been privatised by a key political figure, has now been expressed by unofficial leader of the Russian opposition Alexey Navalny. More accurately, Navalny’s large-scale grassroots presidential campaign turned out to be the form of that doubt. Eighty campaign offices across Russia, thousands of activists on the ground – this sits in clear contrast to the Presidential Administration’s traditional script. To say it more simply: Navalny has proposed a new, democratised interpretation of the elections – and, as expected, the Central Electoral Commission refused to register him as a presidential candidate, citing a corruption conviction (which, according to Navalny himself, was politically motivated). Once Navalny was barred, the campaign organically morphed into what he has dubbed the “voters’ strike”.
