Elections without options

On February 12, at the congress of the Solidarity movement, it was decided to support Alexei Navalny as a candidate for the presidential elections in 2018

The Solidarity movement emerged at the end of 2008 as an attempt to rally the remnants of democratic forces after the failure in the parliamentary elections a year earlier. One of the co-founders of the movement was Boris Nemtsov. Now Boris Nemtsov has been killed, and his comrades-in-arms are trying to revive Solidarity - also after the failure in the elections and a series of scandals that have finished off the reputation of Mikhail Kasyanov's PARNAS party. Actually, the basis of the current Solidarity is just the people who left PARNAS last year.

In preparation for the "Democratic coalition primaries", the leadership of PARNAS spent a lot of effort to reduce the influence of candidates representing Alexei Navalny. Today, Solidarity members who left PARNAS (including Ilya Yashin, lawyer Vadim Prokhorov, who provides legal support to NT, and other oppositionists) see support for Navalny in the presidential election as a key item on their agenda. Solidarity demands to ensure access to participation in the elections for all opposition candidates and to protect them from illegal pressure from bodies controlled by the presidential administration, ”the congress resolution says, in particular. In addition, officials who risk obstructing the opposition in the elections are frightened in the final document by article 278 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (“forcible retention of power”).

Alexei Navalny, who is not a member of Solidarity, nonetheless spoke at the congress and promised the audience, having become head of state, to release political prisoners and hold early elections to the State Duma. He also added that, despite the second guilty verdict in the Kirovles case, he does not intend to refuse to participate in the elections and is ready, if necessary, to go to the European Court of Human Rights again.

Navalny later repeated the same thoughts in an interview with NT: “The Constitution directly states that I have a legal right to participate in elections. I am guided by the Constitution, which is a law of direct action, and I am not interested in the opinion of the Kremlin and various "analytics" on this topic. The politician actually demonstrates his readiness to continue the fight - new branches of his campaign headquarters are opening in the regions (the other day, Navalny's headquarters appeared in Kazan, and in St. Petersburg, State Duma deputy Vitaly Milonov has already managed to register himself with an appeal to the prosecutor's office demanding to close the headquarters of the opposition leader).

“Various analytics” Navalny, not without contempt, calls the comments of lawyers and political scientists who claim that after the Kirov verdict he had practically no chance of legally participating in the campaign. On the other hand, there are not many critics left who, immediately after Navalny announced that he intended to become a presidential candidate, rushed to expose the “delicate game of the Kremlin”, explaining that Navalny was intended to increase the legitimacy of the election procedure and ensure a high turnout.

As you can see, the Kremlin is not particularly concerned about the problem of legitimacy, and they are used to ensuring turnout by other means. The risks that arise in connection with the inevitable access of the opposition candidate to the air of meter television channels are considered by the administration to be more important than the observance of at least some decorum. Dissernet studied the new verdict in the Kirovles case and found that only one of the 56 pages of the document does not contain borrowings from the previous verdict, and the first 23 pages repeat it almost literally.

The turnout of those whom Navalny could bring to the polls is a problem, not a gift for the Kremlin. An imaginary problem, however, since these people, most likely, simply will not have reasons to come to the polling stations.

On the other hand, there were reports (moreover, with references to unnamed "sources") that Mikhail Kasyanov would be the only candidate from the opposition in the presidential elections. Allegedly, he even intends to hold talks about this with Yabloko. True, Yabloko knows nothing about these plans, and Grigory Yavlinsky announced his desire to run before all other potential competitors, back in the summer of 2016. But in the emerging situation, where Navalny is simply afraid to be allowed to vote, Kasyanov’s participation in them is just one more reason for the few representatives of the opposition electorate to ignore these elections, and nothing more.