The European Council on Foreign Relations

Blogger, politician, populist? - Alexey Navalny’s rise

Date: 23rd January 2012  |  Author: Ben Judah,

Categories: Wider Europe,
Tags: , alexey navalny, presidential elections, russia

Alexey Navalny may well be the first Russian internet politician. The charismatic 35 year old emerged not just as an online activist, but leading agitator of the nascent protest movement. His slogan - “Down with the Party of Crooks and Thieves” - has become the chant of the movement and his idea to “vote for anyone else but the Party of Crooks and Thieves” is seen as a factor costing United Russia its majority at the December parliamentary elections. He has the fame of a rock-star amongst protesters and many already think he is the president of tomorrow.

Alexey Navalny’s rise began on his idiosyncratic blog– where he also runs youtube video competitions for the funniest anti-Putin song (prizes include whiskey bottles). He blogs incriminating documents which show embezzlement inside the system and rants humorously with a nationalist tinge. Whilst the Kremlin issues dry and technocratic statements his tweets from the main rallies such – “So cold, but so cool” – ring very differently indeed.

Navalny’s crowd-sourced online campaign posters of the United Russia party’s bear tugging off a sack of money out of a map Russia it has just defecated on are already iconic. Yet Navalny is more than a blogger. He has mounted the first mainstream anti-corruption campaigns using online tools – his website Rospil where volunteers email his team of young lawyers information on suspect tenders to investigate, and the website Rosyamo where Russians are encouraged to upload photos of bad roads to shame the authorities.

Navalny’s young and enthusiastic team managed to create the first political organization in Russia to secure large scale public donations. The secret of Navalny’s success may in fact lie in his at times uncanny early Putinist ring. In the early 2000s Putin promised to defeat the Chechen insurgents and tame the oligarchs. Now, Putin is not seen as an oligarch-slayer but an oligarch himself. Navalny promises to really tame the “party of crooks and thieves,” and really “stop feeding the Caucasus.” Yet unlike Putin he is un-Soviet and confident enough to let people vote on his answers truthfulness online and be quizzed by the Russian writer Boris Akunin – whilst Putin refuses to do TV debates as he is “too busy.”

Despite all this publicity Navalny is something of a mystery to the Russian intelligentsia. His often evasive answers and mix of nationalism and liberalism has left the intelligentsia unsure what he stands for. Nobody is quite sure what to make of his links to leading think-tankers, bankers and liberal writers. A very impressive policy programme is circulating amongst the intelligentsia but will it amount to anything?

Part of his street appeal is his rejection of Russian liberalism as a failed creed for rich Muscovites and embrace of traditionally nationalist themes: erecting a visa-wall with Central Asia, stop subsidising the Caucasus, co-organizing the “Russian March” with far-rights groups and calling for the deportation of illegal immigrants. Videos exist of him from several years ago urging the population to shoot Chechen terrorist like one swats cockroaches. He insists he still agreed with “every word” of the nationalist manifesto Narod he co-organized a few years ago. "Alexey simply thinks we have ethnic problems in Russia and we have to talk about them and not deny them like the government does” says his colleague at Rospil defensively. And indeed – his ‘fortress Russia’ ideas are not unknown to European right-wing ideology.

What worries people are more his instincts or how deep these feelings are sunk into him. Is he a young politician unsure of his beliefs or hiding them? Or merely a populist?

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