Russians braced for key local elections in Moscow and St. Petersburg Sunday — as the exclusion of opposition candidates and imprisonment of anti-government demonstrators cast doubt on the legitimacy of races that analysts say Kremlin-backed candidates still risk losing.
Indeed, with polls showing widespread discontent with President Vladimir Putin’s ruling United Russia party, the limited scope of Russia’s election season was set early on.
Russia’s Election Commission barred opposition-oriented candidates nearly en masse in July, citing candidates’ failure to clear voter signature requirements to participate in elections.
The result: a series of rolling weekend protests in both cities that saw more than 2,500 arrests, many at the hands of truncheon-wielding police and aggressive OMON security forces.
“The aggressive response suggests authorities understand it’s not just about the Moscow Duma,” said Alexander Baunov of the Moscow Carnegie Center. “It’s about reshaping the future of power in Russia.”
Right to protest vs. rush to justice
Putin has insisted citizens have the right to participate in political protests, a constitutional guarantee he reaffirmed again this week.
“(The protests) sometimes it brings positive results, because it wakes up the authorities, sets them in the right direction so they can effectively solve people’s problems,” Putin said when referring to the “Saturday demonstrations” during an economic forum in the far eastern city of Vladivostok Thursday.
Yet nearly all of Russia’s key opposition figures, including several would-be candidates, were repeatedly jailed through the election season.
Meanwhile, Moscow courts quickly sentenced a handful of demonstrators ahead of the vote.
Three- to four-year prison terms were handed down to several protesters for light altercations with police, such as flicking a helmet.
Opposition to have an effect
Though banned from participation in the elections, Russia’s opposition remained poised to influence the outcome of the elections in Moscow.
In the months leading up to election day, opposition leader Alexei Navalny unveiled a strategy called “smart voting,” a calculated effort to consolidate voter support around remaining candidates, no matter how odious, in an effort to oust control from the Kremlin-backed United Russia party.
“I want to remind you how strong we are, and how afraid of us they are,” Navalny said in an online broadcast to his YouTube channel Friday while promoting the strategy.
How much is open to debate — and math.
Other leading opposition voices, such as the exiled businessman Mikhail Khodorkovsky, have called on supporters to resist Navalny’s calls to vote for communist or nationalist candidates simply because they can defeat Putin loyalists.
Yet outside observers have largely endorsed Navalny’s strategy as effective, given traditionally low voter turnout in local races.
“I don’t understand who can be ‘for’ or ‘against’ the smart vote,” sociologist Grigory Yudin wrote in a