MOSCOW – Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky, Russia’s 70th nationalist brand of fire, has long functioned as a safety valve for public discontent, cornering protest votes but then supporting President Vladimir V. Putin at key junctures.
Now, he says, the Kremlin treats his party “like idiots.”
“Get out there and play,” he says his group is told, “but don’t score any goals.”
Outrage at the arrest of Sergei I. Furgal, a popular governor and member of Mr. Zhirinovsky’s party, rocked the Kremlin’s carefully calibrated system of fictitious opposition policies. Street protests in support of the governor continued for the fourth consecutive day in the Khabarovsk region on the Russian Pacific coast, the latest sign that Putin is facing an increasingly volatile domestic political landscape.
“Society is becoming uncontrollable,” said Yury Korgunyuk, a political scientist at the Russian Academy of Sciences. “Old instruments no longer work.”
Among the Kremlin’s long-standing instruments to channel discontent are the “systemic opposition” parties, the most prominent being the Communists and Zhirinovsky’s nationalists. But popular anger in Khabarovsk over Mr. Furgal’s arrest threatens to jump the railings of the Kremlin’s multi-party system.
Communists and nationalists criticize Mr. Putin on occasion, then lose him in landslides in the presidential election: Mr. Zhirinovsky, personally, three times. Things unfold in a similar way at the regional level, where communist and nationalist candidates often divide the opposition vote and hand victory to the ruling United Russia party.
That was also supposed to be Mr. Furgal’s role when the former scrap metal merchant ran for governor of the sprawling Khabarovsk region in 2018. But in a clash with Moscow, he faced a wave of anti-elite sentiment and won in 2018, setting out of immediate speculation on how and when the Kremlin would co-opt or eliminate it.
It finally happened last Thursday when a squad of camouflaged security forces pulled him out of the back seat of a Lexus SUV and took him on an eight-hour commercial flight to Moscow. He was accused of participating in multiple murders in the early 2000s.
Disgruntled residents of Khabarovsk viewed the arrest as a transparent attempt to strip them of their democratic choice, and demonstrated in tens of thousands on Saturday, the biggest protests the region had seen since the early 1990s.
“He was the only governor who, after many years, began to bring the region to its knees,” said Olesya Usoltseva-Zimina, a 41-year-old census specialist who plans to return to demonstrate by Mr. Furgal next Saturday, said . by phone from Khabarovsk. “It was clearly not acceptable to the Kremlin.”
In a leaked recording of a phone call last year, Putin’s representative in Russia’s Far East could be heard complaining that the governor’s approval rating in his region increased while that of the president decreased. Furgal supporters say the straw that broke the glass came earlier this month, when Khabarovsk registered just a 44 percent turnout in the nationwide vote on constitutional amendments that allow Putin to serve until 2036.
“I think a lot of people would allow him to have been involved in some not-so-honest things,” another protester, Sergei Mamayev, a 33-year-old event organizer, said of the governor. “But despite all this, we want our choice to be respected.”
The outburst of anger has put Mr. Zhirinovsky in trouble: stirring the pot too much would irritate Mr. Putin and threaten the financial loot of his political hanger. So far he has divided the difference: he delivered an enthusiastic defense of Mr. Furgal in Parliament, accusing Mr. Putin of chilling repressions, like Stalin; But he also warned supporters that participating in unauthorized street protests would have “only negative consequences.”
“It is a situation where you cannot not be in the opposition, but being in the opposition is dangerous,” said political scientist Korgunyuk. “Zhirinovsky sees his party first as a business, making it difficult for him to break with the authorities.”
The risk to Zhirinovsky and the Kremlin is that discontent over Furgal’s arrest could benefit more intransigent opposition politicians, such as Aleksei A. Navalny. Mr. Navalny’s sometimes nationalistic populist message draws on a similar vein of public discontent as that of Mr. Zhirinovsky. Its branch in the city of Khabarovsk has been a driving force behind the smaller-scale street protests that have continued there this week.
“They should be tougher in lobbying for their interests,” Usoltseva-Zimina said of Zhirinovsky and his Liberal Democratic Party. “You need to somehow take your job as a political leader more seriously.”
Zhirinovsky, in an interview Tuesday with The New York Times, acknowledged that he could lose support. He said that after Mr. Furgal took office, Mr. Putin’s administration had tried to get the new governor to resign from Mr. Zhirinovsky’s party.
“This is horrible,” said Zhirinovsky. “Who will support a team that always loses?”
Known for his racist and misogynistic outbursts and calls for Russia to occupy foreign territory, Zhirinovsky has been a fixture in the country’s politics since the early 1990s. He supported Putin’s recent constitutional amendments and dropped signs that Putin could become Russia’s leader for life.
But in Tuesday’s interview, Zhirinovsky said he was prepared to embrace Russian fatigue with his president, whose current term ends in 2024. Analysts say the pandemic helped push Putin’s approval rating to a low of 20. 59 percent years this spring.
“There will definitely be a new president, either in 2024, or maybe earlier, or in 2028 or 2030,” said Zhirinovsky. “Khabarovsk demonstrated that nothing can be done by force today, that the elections cannot be falsified today.”
Russia’s managed multi-party system has worked for the Kremlin because it fragments the anti-Putin vote. But the protests in Khabarovsk show the potential for discontent in uniting disparate groups.
Saturday’s demonstration drew long-time critics of Putin such as Vitaly Blazhevich, 56, who teaches Russian at a university across the border in China and says he considers Zhirinovsky’s rhetoric to be “absolutely unacceptable” .
“Furgal, of course, is not Václav Havel,” Blazhevich said, referring to the Czech dissident and anti-communist leader. “But where do we get a Václav Havel from? If people sing, ‘Putin quits!’ so I’m with my people. “
Oleg Matsnev contributed to the investigation.
