A supporter of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny holds his portrait
Credit: AP Photo/Pavel Golovkin
Alexei Navalny is the leader of Russia’s opposition but has never held political office. Variously described as a liberal, a populist and a nationalist, Mr Navalny is hated by the Kremlin and has been a divisive figure even within anti-Putin circles.
But his corruption investigations into top officials, his repeated calls for protests, and his steadfastness in the face of repression have nonetheless managed to rally those who oppose the regime.
In a system that has squeezed out dissenting voices over two decades, Mr Navalny has built a national network of campaign offices and influences public debate through his vast social media following.
The closest the activist came to an elected position was in 2013, when he stood for mayor of Moscow against Kremlin-backed candidate Sergei Sobyanin, scoring around 30 percent in a vote he said was tainted by fraud.
Five years later he attempted to run against Mr Putin for the presidency but was kept off the ballot paper because of a controversial conviction for embezzlement. Authorities have since resurrected that charge and are using it as the basis for his current detention.
In the run up to the 2018 election, he laid out his political programme: as well as tackling official corruption, he sought to raise the minimum wage, double public spending on healthcare and education, pursue a less aggressive foreign policy, and hand over more power to Russia’s regions.
A Yale scholar, he has looked to the West for inspiration, earlier saying that he wanted Russia to resemble a “vast, metaphysical Canada”.
But the 44 year old has come in for criticism for appearances at nationalist events and his anti-immigration views. He has used racist slurs against Georgians, which he later apologised for, and appeared in a video that compared migrants to cockroaches, which he described as “artistic license”. He has also called for the relaxation of gun controls.
Mr Navalny was born near Moscow and studied law and finance in Russian universities before entering politics in 1999, as Mr Putin was taking power. He worked for the liberal opposition party Yabloko until the mid-2000s, before splitting with its leadership over his support for nationalist movements.
From then he blogged about corruption, building up an online audience that would develop into a YouTube channel with more than six million subscribers.
Alexei Navalny timeline
The charismatic father-of-two rose to national prominence in 2011, as a face of mass demonstrations against Mr Putin’s return to the presidency after four years as prime minister. It was then that he branded the ruling United Russia “a party of crooks and thieves”, a slogan that would be taken up with enthusiasm by his followers.
In 2012, various leaders from the Russian opposition elected him to lead their movement.
The Kremlin has long talked down the threat Mr Navalny poses to the regime. Mr Putin refuses to say his name in public, referring to him as “the patient in the Berlin clinic” when he was in Germany recovering from a near-fatal poisoning that Mr Navalny says was orchestrated by the state.
Before the poisoning and arrest, Mr Navalny was repeatedly jailed for organising unsanctioned protests. In 2017, he was left partially blind in one eye after green dye was thrown in his face outside his Moscow office.
Despite their leader being violently shut out of formal politics, Mr Navalny’s network of campaigners, lawyers and researchers still play an outsize role in Russian political life.
Several of his allies won positions in local elections last year, and his team’s “smart voting” strategy — which encourages supporters to vote for whichever candidate has the best chance of defeating United Russia, whether they be from communist or right-wing parties — may spell trouble for the Kremlin in upcoming parliamentary polls.
Свежие комментарии