Page 65 - bne_March 2021_20210303

bne March 2021
Opinion 65
Russia's countrywide protests organised by activist Alexey Navalny have caused the biggest political crisis for the Kremlin in a decade, but they have also turned the screws on the "systemic opposition" who now have to make some tough choices ahead of September's Duma elections.
called him an agent and criticised his supporters. Sergey Mironov, the head of the Fair Russia (SR) Party, took time out of his no doubt very busy schedule – merging his moribund party with two nationalist parties – to call Navalny a puppet and a traitor. Grigory Yavlinsky, a senior politician and former leader of the liberal Yabloko, penned an article in which he painted Navalny as a dangerous nationalist.
Dissonance
None of this was surprising, of course. In Russia’s electoral autocracy where the Kremlin controls most financial resourc- es and legal avenues that parties need to conduct electoral campaigns – and often the ballot boxes too – party leaders are dealing with the Kremlin more often than they do with their electorates, especially in an election year. Yavlinsky, for his part, has had a bone to pick with Navalny, who was expelled from Yabloko in 2007 after criticising him (then the head of the party).
On lower levels, however, the parties reacted very differently. Local Yabloko deputies openly criticised Yavlinsky. Several senior members of the KPRF – former Irkutsk governor
Sergey Leshchenko, Valery Rashkin, the head of the party in Moscow, Denis Parfyonov, a Duma deputy and Vyacheslav Markhaev, a former member of the Federation Council, made ambiguous or supportive statements as regards Navalny or the protests, as did Leonid Razvozzhayev, a prominent member
of the Left Front, an ally of the KPRF. The KPRF announced a “constructive and sensible” protest for February 23, the Day of the Fatherland’s Defenders, while the LDPR accept the official result of this year’s Duma election is at least as important as
it is to grant United Russia the necessary number of seats to navigate the turbulent years ahead. Thus the authorities seem to go after the most obvious targets – opposition candidates openly courting Navalny as an ally, as well as Navalny’s regional campaign offices – while they are relying on party leaders and more acquiescent opposition candidates to discredit smart voting either by openly denouncing it or by trash-talking Navalny himself. At the same time, they are also
trying to offer voters just enough new faces – either in new parties or in old parties merging with new ones – to make the election palatable for them without endangering United Russia’s position.
This also reflects a realisation that in recent years the electoral base of systemic parties has become more complex in several regions. The KPRF boosted its appeal in 2018 by briefly replacing the ossified Zyuganov with the much more energetic Pavel Grudinin as the headliner of the party, and by supporting protests against the government’s pension reform. The LDPR’s appeal grew briefly when two of the party’s gubernatorial candidates triumphed over Kremlin-backed incumbents in 2018. In Khabarovsk, the LDPR delivered a double whammy
to United Russia when, one year after Furgal’s surprise victory, the governor’s party all but demolished the ruling party in the Khabarovsk Territory.
Allowing systemic opposition parties to take liberties in order to make them look more alive and appealing has been part of the Kremlin’s toolbox for more than a decade. Yet it seems that the growing grassroots activism of recent years prompted the
“Allowing systemic opposition parties to take liberties in order to make them look more alive and appealing has been part of the Kremlin’s toolbox for more than a decade”
local elites who dominate the local and regional chapters of these parties to rethink their interests, led to more uncontrolled activities, and made it more difficult for the Kremlin’s political technologists to keep the lid on the loyal opposition.
Uneasy dilemmas
Furgal’s election predated smart voting, but voters followed the same principle and in 2019 Navalny’s campaign suggested that it was partly due to their efforts that LDPR candidates won a landslide victory in the Khabarovsk city council as well as the regional parliament (the party disputes this). Following Furgal’s arrest in July 2020 the LDPR was offered a deal to accept the appointment of Mikhail Degtyaryov, an associate of Zhirinovsky who had no links to Khabarovsk, to head the region. Zhirinovsky accepted the deal, but the Khabarovsk LDPR almost tore itself apart over the issue and while the protests in the city ultimately ended, the decision had a devastating effect on the party’s standing in the region – and likely elsewhere, as a significant number of Russian citizens followed the protests.
The KPRF faces a very similar dilemma in Moscow. When local authorities refused to give the party permission to hold
www.bne.eu