This weekend, Russia is going to the polls for its local elections. While unprecedented repression has put an end to the country’s anti-war protests, these votes are the most important space left for democratic politics. They are a chance to expose the conflict between Vladimir Putin’s dictatorship and Russia’s social movements.
“[Local politics] is not an island of democracy,” one of the activists involved in the Moscow local elections told me. “This is the frontline, where vanguard battles are taking place.”
One political campaign, YouNominate (VyDvyzhenie, which in Russian also means ‘You are the movement’), has brought together independent, protest-minded candidates for municipal deputies in Moscow on a single platform.
The team, set up this summer by young left-wing politicians, has nominated more than 100 candidates for lists at hundreds of polling stations throughout the Russian capital. And in other regions of Russia, independent candidates from the liberal Zemsky Congress movement and Yabloko political party, in alliance with YouNominate, are fighting for local council seats.
Though local politicians face significant risk of repression, local politics is again colliding with national politics in Russia. As the YouNominate platform does not hide its opposition to the war in Ukraine, voting for its candidates is a legal way to speak out against the Kremlin’s actions. The protest vote, in other words, at these municipal elections could become an anti-war vote.
“It has politicised people who attend these elections, and they think about the war and choose candidates according to their position on it,” one of the YouNominate activists told me.
“The Moscow mayor’s office – I know this for sure – sees these elections as, among other things, about supporting or not supporting the war,” they continue. “Therefore, the [Moscow city authorities] cannot lose. It would be unacceptable for the regime to have an anti-war coalition win.”
One of the campaigners behind the platform, Mikhail Lobanov, believes the future of the war could be influenced by people showing that they are against it at the ballot box. He argues that the Russian authorities’ determination to push ahead with mobilisation – calling up reservists and veterans to the war – and strengthen its military propaganda is dependent on public opinion.
Municipal politics and the Left movement
On the eve of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, researchers from Laboratory of Public Sociology, an independent initiative, argued that the pro-democracy movements in the country were facing a paradox.
“The greatest rise and even flowering of grassroots democratic politics is happening now, at the moment of its simultaneous decline due to political repression,” they said.
One of the most striking political campaigns of the pre-war period came during the September 2021 elections to the Russian parliament, the State Duma. Russia’s democratic Left finally arrived on the political scene – led by Lobanov, who became a prominent figure while running for Parliament. As Lobanov faced off against a top propaganda journalist, his team relied on a cocktail of ‘real issues’ and opposition politics, which had proved popular in local activism.
Lobanov’s grassroots campaign failed to achieve victory, possibly due to a new online voting system, which was able to be hacked and manipulated by the authorities. But the ideas and people that powered his campaign, along with many other local campaigns and initiatives, are now forming the backbone of the campaign for local elections.
Today, the Kremlin’s war has exacerbated Moscow’s pre-existing economic problems and weakened the authorities’ ability to deal with them. This, combined with public opposition to the Moscow administration’s style of management creates fertile ground for political struggle – in which the YouNominate team can grow its Left-democratic political agenda. What’s more, the Russian Communist Party, which is the traditional vote sink for left-wing or protest voters, has dropped in the polls since last year and is “obviously not going to win” this time, according to one of the platform’s leaders.
A mass movement against both Russia’s war on Ukraine and the Putin administration can grow only from the understanding firstly that the war affects the interests of the inhabitants of the Russian Federation, and secondly that it completely blocks the public’s ability to defend these interests.
Though it may appear paradoxical, local politics in Russia is often more connected to ‘class’ than national politics. At the local level, activists can more easily see (and expose) the connection between economic oppression and political domination – they see how public officials protect property developers or how local deputies from the ruling party issue illegal permits to use greenfield sites for commercial facilities.
YouNominate and other pro-democracy movements are banking on there being an electorate for these messages. As one activist told me, they see their target voters as educated people who “do not accept the military-patriotic agenda”, but “feel the absence of social change in liberal rhetoric”.
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