Getting out of the electoral ‘ghetto’
Despite his arrest and conviction on fraud charges in 2013, Navalny ran for mayor of Moscow that year. In the campaign, he innovated electoral politics, recruiting young volunteers who met voters on the streets and in their apartment blocks.
Navalny won almost 30% of the vote—double that expected—and claimed that the only reason Putin’s hand-picked candidate, Sergei Sobyanin, had gotten above the 50% needed to secure a first-round victory was due to a falsified vote.
Navalny later articulated the real success, as he saw it, in an interview with fellow opposition figure Vladimir Kara-Murza: “We have shown that ordinary people—with no administrative resources, no corporate sponsors, and no public relations gurus—can unite and achieve results at the ballot box,” he said. “We have shown that we are no longer confined to a 3% electoral ‘ghetto.’”
Navalny concluded: “For me, the most important result of this campaign is the return of real politics to Russia.”
During that 2013 campaign, my research team interviewed Navalny activists and observed the work at campaign headquarters.
These interviews underscored Navalny’s relationship with the people. Many of the volunteers rejected the idea that they were working for him. Instead, they were volunteering because they admired Navalny’s tactics. They liked his political style. They wanted change in Russia.
Navalny brought Russians alienated by Russian politics together and empowered them. As one campaign volunteer interviewed in our study argued, “We all were frightened before the first protest and even left a will before we joined the movement. But it was not a mob. There were people like us. The feeling we had in Navalny’s office was the feeling of being with people like me.”
Through the next decade, Navalny and his team continued to return political competition to Russia’s politics. They built local organisations that attracted support and found some success in the Siberian cities of Tomsk and Novosibirsk, despite the endless obstacles the Kremlin placed in their way.
