The United Democrats coalition — spearheaded by Dmitry Gudkov, a former opposition lawmaker, and Yabloko, Russia’s oldest anti-Putin party — claimed 14 districts in the September 10 elections, in some cases winning with a landslide. Opposition candidates held just one district before Sunday’s vote.
The majority of the districts won by the coalition lie in the very heart of Moscow. In the Tverskaya district, home to some of the city’s wealthiest residents, the opposition took 11 out of 12 council seats. The coalition also recorded a clean sweep of seats in the Gagarinsky district, the Red Square neighborhood where Putin is registered to vote.
“This is the start of a new political era,” Vitali Shkliarov, the movement’s Soviet-born, U.S.-based adviser, said in an interview near the Kremlin as the final votes came in.
Among the victorious opposition candidates were Ilya Yashin — a former ally of Boris Nemtsov, the Kremlin critic shot dead in central Moscow in 2015 — and Ilya Azar, a well-known opposition journalist. (Alexei Navalny, the opposition leader who wants to challenge Putin for the presidency, played no role in the campaign.)
But despite the opposition’s understandable euphoria, its overwhelming victory in central Moscow is mostly symbolic; district councilors have very little real political power. Turnout was also low — at just 15 percent, about half the number that turned out for last year’s parliamentary election.
City-wide, Putin’s ruling United Russia party secured about 75 percent of the district council seats. But Golos, an independent election monitor, registered over 600 complaints of election fraud.
In one district, soldiers were reportedly bussed in to vote for United Russia. A local official in another district was filmed apparently instructing polling station staff how to falsify votes. Another election official locked herself in her office with the official vote tally when it became clear that the opposition had won. She emerged at 4:30 a.m. after opposition candidates staged a sit-in at the polling station.
None of this has taken the shine off the opposition’s victories in central Moscow. The United Democrats hope its success there will pave the way for a greater upset at the next year’s mayoral election. The election results also marked a crushing defeat for the Communist Party and the pseudo opposition parties the Kremlin typically uses to provide the illusion of a functioning democracy.
“We are now the second biggest political force in Moscow,” Gudkov, the head of the United Democrats coalition, said. “The authorities have to reckon with us.”
* * *
The campaign, based within sight of the Kremlin towers, was staffed by some three dozen people, including lawyers and designers for campaign leaflets.
Shkliarov, the movement’s adviser, attributes the upset to door-to-door canvassing — something rarely seen in Russia — and campaign technologies inspired, in part, by his experience with U.S. politician Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential bid, when he worked as head of mobilization in Nevada.
The political campaigning software he encountered there for the first time formed the base of the liberal Russian coalition’s bid in Moscow, albeit “adapted to scale,” said Shkliarov, who is originally from Soviet Belarus but has been based in Washington, D.C. since 2010.
Powered by bots, the system allowed candidates to become their own campaign and field managers.
“If you run one campaign, you can run an army of people,” Shkliarov said. “But if you want to scale it up to 1,000 candidates, you have to substitute people with technology. The efficiency was incredible — each candidate cost us around $15 a day.”
“Most people in Russia have never seen an elected official at their doorstep,” he added. “They serve three or four terms, but never get out and meet regular people.”
“Shkliarov taught us not to hide behind the campaign, but to tell people about ourselves,” said Maxim Mikhailov, a 20-year-old small business owner and one of the coalition’s candidates in central Moscow.
“My whole strategy in the long-term is to make people in Russian realize that politics starts at home, in your own neighborhood,” Shkliarov said. “This is a big challenge for many Russians, who were raised in a totalitarian country and have never had a real political culture.”
Alongside campaign lawyers, Shkliarov also walked candidates through Russia’s notoriously byzantine electoral registration requirements.
“This is the stage at which the government usually kicks out opposition and independent candidates,” Shkliarov said. “You can’t just go to City Hall with your passport and register to run. You have to collect signatures in support of your candidacy to get registered. If you miss a comma or misspell something, the whole list of signatures is canceled. You can’t fundraise with credit cards or online payment methods. You have to go to the bank with your passport, and fill out forms by hand. If you fill out something incorrectly, the whole donation goes to the government.”
The government sets up so many barriers, Shkliarov said, that “no one without legal experience can enter the race.”
* * *
Among the opposition’s 266 successful candidates, many were young people who have little or no memory of life without Putin in the Kremlin.
Others were previously politically apathetic Muscovites drawn into politics by City Hall’s controversial scheme to demolish tens of thousands of five-floor Soviet-era buildings and forcibly rehouse people in multi-story tower blocks.
“Just one year ago, I was so far away from all of these political games, but now I am a district councilor,” Elmira Shagiakhmetova, a businesswoman who took part in the campaign to stop the controversial renovations, told POLITICO.
The coalition’s unexpected success could make it easier for United Democrats leader Gudkov to challenge Sergei Sobyanin, the Kremlin-backed mayor of Moscow, at next year’s mayoral election.
Sobyanin has angered many Muscovites with a series of citywide roadworks and renovations that critics say are designed to enrich government-connected property developers.
“This is a revolution of the mind,” said Gudkov. “A victory for new technologies and progress.”
Yekaterina Schulmann, a prominent political analyst, predicted the election results would help the liberal opposition rid itself of a reputation as perennial “losers” and attract more voters to its cause.
The Moscow mayoral election in September 2018 will be “a really big thing,” Shkliarov said.
“Every single change in Russia starts with Moscow,” he said. “If Moscow’s mayor doesn’t support the president, then the president is finished. I’ll be back for that, for sure.”
Marc Bennetts is a Moscow-based journalist and author of “I’m Going to Ruin Their Lives: Inside Putin’s War on Russia’s opposition.”
Original Article
Source: politico.eu
Author: Marc Bennetts
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