MOSCOW – In an undisclosed location outside of Russia, five people have been meeting regularly for months to choose how to reverse President Vladimir V. Putin in this weekend’s Russian elections.
The five are allies of jailed opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny, all exiled by the threat of lengthy prison sentences. Its strategy is to use the parliamentary elections held from Friday to Sunday to undermine Putin’s ruling United Russia party, although authorities have banned all Navalny sponsors and other known opposition figures from going on. the ballot boxes.
The idea, which Mr Navalny calls smart voting, is to unite opposition voters around a specific candidate running against United Russia in each of the country’s 225 constituencies. That candidate could be liberal, nationalist or Stalinist. Before the Russians go to the polls, they can enter their address in the smartphone application “Navalny”, which then responds with the names of the candidates for whom they should vote, whether or not they agree with the views of these people.
“We want as many politicians not approved by the Kremlin as possible to end up in parliaments, including regional ones,” Ruslan Shaveddinov, one of Navalny’s allies working on the “smart vote,” said in a telephone interview. “This, in any case, creates turbulence in the system, which is very, very important to us.”
The smart voting strategy shows how an opposition movement the Kremlin has managed to crush inside Russia in recent months can still influence political events from the outside. It is also a reason why this weekend’s elections will come with a certain degree of suspense, although a general victory for United Russia is assured.
“If you get a candidate’s name through smart voting and go to the polls, you will become 1,000 percent more influential and powerful than your version who complains and does nothing,” Navalny wrote in a prison letter released Wednesday, imploring his supporters to vote. “Don’t you want to try it?” he asked. “And also become a better version of yourself?”
A similar tactical voting strategy has been tried before, not always successfully. Opponents of Brexit used it in Britain’s 2019 parliamentary elections, but failed, as the Labor Party suffered the worst defeat in decades at the hands of conservatives.
However, Russia is a very different case. Its nominal democracy is not free and fair, but the Kremlin continues to seek the brilliance of popular legitimacy by holding elections in which a stable of boring parties normally divides the opposition vote. Navalny’s strategy, which was first deployed at the regional level in 2019, seeks to turn this system of “managed democracy” against Putin.
While Mr Navalny’s personal approval rating remains low in Russia (independent pollster Levada put it at 14% in June), authorities appear frightened by his team’s push.
The Russian Internet regulator has blocked access to the smart voting website and has demanded that Google and Apple remove “Navalny” from their app stores. Companies have failed to do so, prompting further allegations of US interference in the Russian elections. Maria V. Zakharova, a spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, said without providing evidence that the smart vote was affiliated with the Pentagon.
Last week, the Foreign Ministry summoned the US ambassador to Moscow, John J. Sullivan, to present what he described as “incontrovertible proof of the violation of Russian law by the” digital giants. “Americans in the context of election preparation and conduct.”
Grigorii Golosov, a political scientist at St. Petersburg European University who has studied smart voting, says the Kremlin has good reason to be nervous. Even a state-led pollster, VTsIOM, puts the current level of support for United Russia at 29 percent, down from 40 percent before the last election, in 2016.
Given that Russia’s single-term districts only require a simple majority to win, he said, a few additional percentage points generated by the smart vote could be enough to push a rival into United Russia in a competitive field.
Certainly, the notion of success is relative. United Russia is almost certain to maintain its majority in the lower house of parliament, the Duma, because half of the 450 seats are distributed by party list. The ruling party is sure to get the most votes and the Russian elections are full of fraud.
But Mr Navalny’s allies say even electing a few dozen new members of parliament to oppose United Russia would be significant, as it would complicate the Kremlin’s dealings with what has been little more than a legislature in recent years. of rubber stamps. And they insist that in much of the country, the vote-counting process is transparent enough to try to oust United Russia lawmakers by worthwhile democratic means.
So far, the main opposition parties in parliament, communists and nationalists, have been mostly loyal to Mr Putin. But that could change.
“If for some reason more serious political complications would begin in Russia, control of Parliament becomes crucial,” Golosov said. “If the Kremlin weakens in the eyes of opposition parties, they will start acting in their own interests.”
Navalny staff members say they spent months analyzing all federal constituencies, as well as regional and municipal elections that are also being held this weekend. The team of five analysts at the helm of the project: Mr. Shaveddinov; Navalny’s usual chief of staff, Leonid Volkov; and three more: they have met during meetings for hours several times a week. Shaveddinov said they consulted voting data, dozens of regional experts and field reports to determine the person best placed to defeat the United Russia candidate in each contest.
They also note the elections to the 2019 Moscow City Duma, in which they won 20 candidates chosen by Mr. Navalny’s team, which diluted the number of members of United Russia in the legislature from 38 to 25, from 45 seats.
“The Kremlin is trying to roll all politics with concrete,” Shaveddinov said. “And yet, several flowers bloom.”
Shaveddinov, 25, fled Russia earlier this year. He spent 2020 in what he describes as modern exile, was arrested and sent to a year of compulsory military service at a remote location on an island in the Arctic Ocean. He is now abroad and organizes weekly YouTube programs with Mr. Volkov, who are trying to mobilize support for the smart voting strategy.
Navalny, Russia’s best-known opposition figure, was poisoned by a military-grade nervous agent last year and arrested in January on his return to Moscow from treatment in Germany. National protests followed his return, and Russia outlawed his movement and forced his main allies to flee.
On Wednesday, Navalny’s team released its 1,234 federal and regional voting recommendations, which waited two days before the election began to prevent its ballot selections from being withdrawn from the ballot. For those who installed “Navalny” on their smartphones, the news came via a push notification: “Your candidates are already in the app. Open it, look and vote!”
More than half of the Duma candidates the team approved were communists, although party leader Gennadi A. Zyuganov this year described Mr Navalny as “a traitor who came to set fire to the country. “.
The strategy has sparked some discontent among Kremlin critics, especially in places like Moscow and St. Petersburg, where several opposition candidates are running in the same district. The risk is that Navalny’s team may misjudge which candidate has the most support and end up splitting up instead of consolidating the opposition vote.
In the 198th district in Moscow, Navalny’s team chose Anastasiya Bryukhanova, a 28-year-old manager working on urban improvement projects. Another opposition candidate running in the same district, Marina Litvinovich, took to Twitter and Facebook to call the decision a “big mistake” and stopped supporting Ms. Bryukhanova.
In an interview, Ms. Bryukhanova estimated that the approval of the smart vote could add at least seven percentage points to its outcome.
“This significantly increases our chances of victory,” he said.
The goal of the smart vote is to motivate people like Azalia Idrisova, a 33-year-old businesswoman in the field of mental health in Moscow who said she was overwhelmed by the number of candidates and political parties involved in the vote. He said he would follow the smart voting recommendations, although he hoped the election results would be falsified.
“All I can do is go vote,” he said.
Oleg Matsnev contributed to the reports.