Challenging Putin

As has been widely remarked (including here), this is a very big year for elections. More people are voting than ever before, in elections that span the full range from the democratic to the meaningless. Well down the bad end of the spectrum are Belarus, which holds its parliamentary “election” on Sunday, and its big brother Russia, which holds a presidential “election” three weeks later.

It’s Russia that’s been in the news lately, with the death in prison last week of opposition leader Alexei Navalny. The hazards of opposition to Vladimir Putin were already well known; you can read about them in my report on the first attempt to murder Navalny, back in 2020. But in the two decades of Navalny’s involvement, Russia has regressed from a badly flawed democracy to an unvarnished dictatorship.

All the more striking, then, that next month’s “election” attracted a genuine Putin critic in addition to the usual run of purely nominal opponents. Boris Nadezhdin, a local councillor who has spoken out against the invasion of Ukraine, gathered the 100,000 signatures required to be a candidate, on a platform of peace abroad and liberalisation at home.

Nadezhdin has been tolerated so far and even permitted on Russian television. But the enthusiasm generated by his candidacy was evidently seen as a threat, so it was no great surprise two weeks ago when the electoral commission announced that it had found “irregularities” in his paperwork and disqualified him from the ballot.

In a very thoughtful piece this week marking the second anniversary of the Ukraine invasion,* the Economist explains Nadezhdin’s position:

What people crave is a return to normalcy, not a revolution. And this craving explains the sudden popularity of Boris Nadezhdin … He did not call the “special military operation” a crime or even a tragedy. He called it a mistake, something that can be corrected. And instead of blaming his countrymen he tried to comfort them and give them hope.

The relative moderation of Nadezhdin’s critique probably means he is safe from immediate physical danger. But it would be most unwise of him to assume that will last.

Meanwhile in Belarus, equally little genuine competition has been allowed for Sunday’s “election”. President Alexander Lukashenko, who faced down mass protests following his fraudulent re-election in 2020, has either imprisoned or driven into exile all of his leading opponents. At the last parliamentary election, in 2019, a few actual opposition parties were allowed to contest, although none of them won seats; this year, only pro-government parties are on the ballot.

Although Lukashenko remains a loyal ally of Putin, who supported him in the crisis of 2020-21, the effective absorption of Belarus into Russia that many expected at the time has still not happened. But their political systems have drawn closer together than ever, and not in a good way.

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* Thanks to Craig Silva for drawing it to my attention.