Russian opposition activist sees Putin’s remarks as good sign

(Interfax – September 5, 2013) Russian opposition activist and Moscow mayoral candidate Aleksey Navalnyy believes that, by commenting about him yesterday, Russian President Vladimir Putin wanted to lower the candidate’s rating the Moscow mayoral election on 8 September, Russian Interfax news agency reported on 5 September.

“Thus the authorities are making desperate attempts to lower my rating by a few percentage points,” Navalnyy said at his final election campaign press conference on the same day.

According to Navalnyy, the authorities used their “main weapon”. This shows, he says, “that the authorities, just as we, are looking at proper opinion polls and realizing that a second round is almost unavoidable”.

“I think they are not going to abandon these attempts. We are seeing now that they are trying to disrupt the concert (a rally-concert on 6 September). I think that in the remaining couple of days they will arrange some kind of media-attack against our headquarters and we are of course expecting it. But this is a good signal. This shows that we are doing better than they planned,” Navalnyy said.

On 4 September Putin said in an interview with Channel One and Associated Press that Navalnyy had always had brushes with the law-enforcement bodies, although Putin never said the activist’s name.

[featured image is file photo]