Russia’s regional elections bring rare win for Navalny

Russian opposition inflicts damage on Putin’s United Russia in regional votes.

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MOSCOW — Kremlin critics have been craving some good news since the star of Russia’s opposition, Alexei Navalny, was poisoned.

Late on Sunday, they got it: For the first time ever, in regional elections this weekend, prominent Navalny allies won deputy seats and stripped Vladimir Putin's United Russia party of its majority in two cities.

“This is the answer to all the whining that Alexei allegedly has no support in Russia’s regions,” tweeted Navalny’s spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh as the results came in. “He has lots of support.”

But while Champagne corks might have popped in Navalny’s campaign offices across the country, many ordinary Russians who wanted real change will be left feeling deflated. Early results showed that at higher levels of government, the Kremlin’s grip remains as firm as ever.

For Navalny, the elections in more than two dozen Russian regions for different levels of governance were above all a moment to test his “smart voting” strategy, ahead of an important parliamentary vote in 2021.

The goal was to undermine United Russia’s — and by extension Putin’s — hold on regional power by uniting voters behind a rival candidate. Some of Navalny’s own people were also on the ballot.

In Siberia, it proved to be an unprecedented success. In the student town of Tomsk, the head of Navalny’s local office Ksenia Fadeyeva won a seat on the local council, as did her colleague Andrei Fateyev.

In Russia’s third-largest city Novosibirsk, vocal Navalny ally Sergey Boiko won a local council seat and so did several members of his “coalition” of opposition-minded politicians.

In both places, according to early results, United Russia lost its majority.

The outcome is as much a testament to Navalny’s ability to tap into local protest sentiment as of his own clout as Russia’s second most prominent politician after Putin. The Kremlin has strenuously denied any involvement in Navalny's poisoning, while major Western powers — including Germany, where he is now in hospital — have demanded an explanation.

Right before he was poisoned with the deadly Novichok nerve agent, Navalny had visited both Siberian cities to campaign for the smart voting system. He had also recorded two corruption investigations that have since garnered a combined 8.5 million views on social media.

Vote-rigging charges

For his allies, the wins in both cities are sweet revenge for his poisoning. But while they might claim a moral victory, the overall picture is much more ambiguous. In all 18 regions that held a gubernatorial vote, pro-government candidates won a landslide victory — even at a time of increasing discontent with the authorities over falling wages and Putin's handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

For the Kremlin that is a better result than in similar elections in 2018, when four regions had to hold a second round of voting and United Russia lost three governor seats to dark-horse candidates.The arrest of one of those governors this summer sparked ongoing anti-Moscow protests in the city of Khabarovsk in Russia’s far east.

This time around, all pro-government candidates won by huge margins, in some cases beating even Putin’s own sky-high election record. Critics were quick to claim that such results, even in regions where protest sentiment is traditionally high, could only have been achieved through tampering.

Ahead of the vote, the independent election watchdog Golos warned that new voting rules, allowing for early and electronic voting, have made rigging easier and oversight more difficult. On Monday, Golos reported more than 1,690 violations.

Such reports are likely to sap Russians' belief in the ballot box as an instrument of influence. “If these are the kind of elections we’ll get, power will change hands regardless. Just not through elections,” tweeted opposition politician Yevgeny Roizman.

Also overshadowing the outcome of the vote for the opposition is the question of whether the results of Navalny’s smart voting strategy will be converted into real political clout in the months to come.

With not enough of their own candidates, Navalny’s smart voting system has had little choice but to urge supporters to back members of Russia’s so-called systemic opposition parties. At a national level, those parties toe the Kremlin line on all important issues.

If they behave similarly at a local level, it will discourage Russians from voting “smart” next time around, making them wonder what is the point of the exercise.

So far, Navalny’s smart voting strategy has triumphed in votes where the stakes were relatively low, with the Kremlin apparently prepared to make sacrifices at the municipal level — while not relaxing its grip in votes for more important posts. That is the challenge for Navalny’s team ahead of next year’s parliamentary vote.