Election Season: Voting for Moscow Mayor

(Moscow News – themoscownews.com – Kristen Blyth – September 6, 2013) On September 8, Muscovites will take to the polling booths to cast their votes for the next mayor of the capital. That wasn’t supposed to happen this year; incumbent Sergei Sobyanin still had two years left in his term when he unexpectedly announced in June that he would step down and run for his own seat.

“Muscovites don’t want elections in two or three years, but now,” Sobyanin said in a radio interview with Ekho Moskvy last week. “I realized that if I leave everything to circumstance, after a while they’ll consider me a coward.”

Popular elections of regional bosses were canceled in 2004 as a Kremlin initiative to tighten federal control over the provinces. Governors ­ and the Moscow mayor has governor status ­ have since been effectively appointed by the presidential administration until last year, when the law returning popular vote was enacted.

The timing of Sobyanin’s resignation, still, made it clear that his integrity was not the only thing at stake. “In Russian politics, we always have to sift through the five or six layers of what’s really going on,” Sarah Oates, a professor at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism and an expert on Russian political campaigns, told The Moscow News. “We all have to acknowledge that the timing is a little odd.”

The mayor’s surprise announcement, first, gave potential opponents pathetically little time to mount viable campaigns, giving Sobyanin a likely guaranteed victory. The incumbent is predicted to capture about 58 percent of the vote, according to a survey published by the independent pollster Levada Center on September 1: a massive lead over the distant second-place challenger, opposition activist and blogger Alexei Navalny, who has about 18 percent.

It could also be a Kremlin experiment in early elections. This political manipulation tactic could later be applied to State Duma elections to time campaigns in favor of the ruling party, said Nikolai Petrov, a political analyst formerly with the Carnegie Moscow Center.

Mainly, however, Moscow’s mayoral race is the government’s attempt at a more-or-less fair, legitimate election ­ a show of democracy that may mollify the opposition while posing no real threat to the Kremlin.

“It’s to put an end to the protests and show that authorities in Moscow ­ in the very heart of the protest movement ­ can win without fraud,” Petrov said. “The elections will show that not only can the Kremlin win, but it can win by a landslide.”

Among the other candidates is Sergei Mitrokhin, a candidate from the liberal Yabloko whose party has had one of the worst showings in polls over the last decade. LDPR’s Mikhail Degtyaryov, 32 years old, recently filmed a campaign video shirtless in a banya, announced that Russia will lead the world in victory against the Antichrist, and proposed that women should be allowed two days off work a month to deal with menstruation.

Ivan Melnikov, the candidate for the Communist Party, has never been a notable public politician; neither has Nikolai Levichev, A Just Russia’s candidate.

The only real competitor is Navalny ­ an opposition activist and leader of the capital’s protest movement. Navalny is the only ­ and, possibly, the first-ever ­ candidate to run a Western-style campaign in Russia. He’s running on an “everyman” anti-corruption platform, meeting voters and answering questions at daily stump speeches around the city in an effort to establish that he’s just a normal Muscovite.

Navalny launched a formidable grassroots volunteer training program, with even a touch of humor to it. “Don’t die,” suggests a short guide of volunteer dos and don’ts on Navalny’s campaign website. “We need you out there alive. Zombies are the voters of United Russia.”

Supporters can buy branded iPhone covers, stickers, and T-shirts with slogans like, “I’m a brother of Navalny” and “That awkward moment when your president’s a thief,” a reference to his anti-corruption campaign against President Vladimir Putin’s retinue.

Navalny was briefly detained after one public meeting, and Leonid Volkov, his campaign manager, told The Moscow News that police have stopped about 20 volunteers from distributing campaign literature. Otherwise, Navalny has been allowed to campaign quite freely.

Navalny’s powerful role in Moscow’s protest movement lends his candidacy an air of genuine authenticity ­ and the government has gone to great lengths to ensure that he competes in the mayoral election. He registered as a candidate on July 17 only with the unexpected help of Sobyanin, who ordered the municipal deputies from his United Russia party to help Navalny collect the necessary signatures for registration.

The next day, Navalny was convicted of embezzlement and sentenced to a five-year prison term, but was granted temporary freedom by the court on July 19 to allow him to continue campaigning pending appeal of his conviction.

“Navalny’s admission to the mayoral election suggests that the Kremlin is trying to find ways to increase the legitimacy of [the authorities],” Alexander Morozov, director of the UNIK Center for Media Research, told The Moscow News. “I called it ‘the development of competition without a change of power.’ This a paradoxical concept…but the presidential office hopes to keep the situation under control and offer something to the new urban class that already distrusts Putin and the whole system of political institutions.”

Barring vote fraud on Election Day and interference with observers, Morozov added, “It will be a big step toward fair elections.”

Simultaneously, the campaign is a chance to dispirit the protest movement and prove that even with a “fair” election, the opposition can’t win.

Putin voiced that idea explicitly in the summer of 2012. When answering questions during a visit to the Seliger youth camp, Putin explained a new law relaxing registration requirements for political parties as a way for non-mainstream political groups “to understand that the public does not support them.”

Sobyanin indeed seems set to win re-election by a wide margin. Navalny, in the coming months, may lose his appeal, and his conviction might bar him from ever holding public office.

“The mayoral elections are manipulation at its best,” Oates, the political campaigns expert, told The Moscow News. “You allow a contender to run, you have a façade of democracy, then lock him away and send a message to anyone who would want to do the same.”

Still, a win for Sobyanin on September 8 would deliver a hollow victory to the Kremlin, Russia political researcher Sean Roberts noted in an August report for the Finnish Institute of International Affairs.

“The extraordinary efforts to give the election a modicum of legitimacy do little to distract from the increasingly dysfunctional electoral process,” Roberts wrote.