Democracy, Putin-Style The Kremlin fears Alexei Navalny is too popular, bars his candidacy.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/democracy-putin-style-1514331789
The rules for Russia’s presidential election this spring may appear opaque and confusing to outsiders, but they boil down to one. Vladimir Putin is running for re-election, and if you are someone whose popularity holds the potential to embarrass him, you’re not going to be allowed on the ballot.
That is what is now happening to Alexei Navalny, the Russian lawyer who uses a popular blog to expose corruption in government and state-owned entities. These included a March video that went viral accusing Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev of graft. For the past year, Mr. Navalny has been making trips across the country in a grass-roots election bid for the Russian presidency. As the election nears, Mr. Navalny is proving too popular for Mr. Putin’s tastes.
On Monday Russia’s top election body barred Mr. Navalny from running for president, invoking a politically motivated conviction for embezzlement to declare him ineligible. Mr. Navalny has responded by calling for Russians to boycott the election. So the Kremlin is now saying Mr. Navalny’s call for a boycott may also be illegal, and perhaps that will serve as pretext for another arrest.
Welcome to democracy, Putin-style. In today’s Russia, an opposition candidate is convicted on trumped up charges that are designed to scare him off from politics and his anticorruption campaigns. He decides to run anyway, and then is declared ineligible by virtue of the conviction. Which leaves the Kremlin in the position of threatening Mr. Navalny with more jail time for boycotting an election the Kremlin has prevented him from entering.
Mr. Navalny is a brave man who knows what he is doing and what he’s risking. But Mr. Putin’s moves against Mr. Navalny and his associates aren’t those of a strong and confident man. To the contrary, they are the actions of someone letting his fears get the best of him. In the video statement Mr. Navalny put out after he was declared ineligible, he had it exactly right: “Putin is terribly scared and is afraid of running against me.”
Comments are closed.
