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For many years, Russian President Vladimir Putin has tried by all means to delegitimize Alexei Navalny, his main opponent, best known for investigations into the corruption of the regime. Among other things, Putin almost never spoke Navalny’s name in public, to avoid legitimizing his opponent’s status, and in early February a Moscow court sentenced Navalny to three and a half years in prison for violation of probation, with a sentence considered by practically everyone. be politically motivated.
Putin’s latest attempt to delegitimize Navalny and weaken the movement that supports him was to create a “bogus” opposition party, in an attempt to attract the votes of disaffected from the more moderate regime and reduce the consensus group in comparisons of Navalny: The party is called New People and was founded last year by businessman Aleksei Nechayev, owner of a cosmetics company.
Nechayev adopted some of the anti-corruption slogans popularized by Navalny and spoke of the need to change something in Russia, another issue often addressed by Putin’s main opponent (Navalny).
A protest against the arrest of Alexei Navalny in Moscow, January 31, 2021 (AP Photo / Alexander Zemlianichenko, file)
During a recent interview with New York Times At the party’s Moscow headquarters, Nechayev explained that in order to participate in elections in Russia, a party must respect three rules: avoid criticizing Putin and his family, receive no funding from abroad, and not organize unauthorized demonstrations. “We did not cross any of these red lines,” Nechayev said openly. During another interview, given last year to the news site. Jellyfish, Nechayev had denied that his party had been born on Putin’s recommendation, but had failed to convince and, at the same time, had widely criticized Navalny.
It is not the first time that the regime has organized an opposition by means of a feint: the Russian political system itself is based on the presence in parliament of the so-called “systemic opposition”, which is the front, which votes on all issues important along with Putin’s party. The non-systemic opposition, on the other hand, is almost non-existent, with the exception of Navalny’s party, which in recent years has managed to gain some visibility even outside Moscow.
A bogus opposition party was founded, for example, in 2006 by Putin’s collaborator, Vladislav Y. Surkov. The party was called Fair Russia and, after mildly criticizing Putin in subsequent parliamentary elections, it openly supported the president. In the 2018 presidential elections, the main leader of the opposition parties was Ksenia Sobchak, a former television host whose father was very close to Putin. Sobchak also harshly criticized Navalny for his methods and refrained from openly attacking Putin – he got more than a million votes, but stopped at 1.68 percent. Since then he has abandoned politics and today works mainly as influence.
Although it appears to have the support of Putin, the false opposition does not have many margins. the guardian Said last year a New Town candidate for local council in Tomsk, Siberia, staged a protest to criticize the transformation of a maternity clinic into a hospital for COVID-19 patients. Three days later, the gym he owned received an inspection from the Russian health agency, which identified many alleged violations.
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In Russia, “the real opposition is made up of parties that do not register,” he told the New York Times Andrei Kolesnikov, a political scientist at the Carnegie Moscow Center. It happens very often to the candidates of Navalny’s party, for example: unless there are surprises in the next parliamentary elections, scheduled for September 19, 2021, Russia of the Future will only get a few percentage points.
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