Street-talking lawyer fronts anti-Putin protests

With rousing rhetoric and knack for coining catchphrases, Alexei Navalny has emerged as the star of the protest movement against Vladimir Putin and one of its biggest hopes for posing a serious challenge to the Russian strongman.

The lawyer-turned-politician, who will front the latest opposition protest against Putin on Saturday, first gained respect on the Internet with a blog blasting corruption and Putin’s “vertical” grip on power.

But later his radical and nationalist-tinged rhetoric — which has caused consternation among some liberals in the protest movement — and a brief jail term in December gave him street cred.

He makes no secret of being ready to join mainstream politics and challenge Putin — in fair elections.

“Every person involved in politics has political ambitions. My ambitions stretch as far as my voters can take me,” Navalny said at a rally in Saint Petersburg last month.

The authorities seem to fear the photogenic, articulate speaker, who is never given airtime on state television. Last month, a politics show on Russian MTV closed abruptly after its presenter booked him for an interview.

At the latest rally Monday he called for protesters “to start peaceful civil disobedience protests,” even though riot police swiftly wound up a slightly absurd attempt to occupy a fountain.

“We will go out and take the streets and squares of Moscow, and we will not leave!” he shouted from the stage.

Navalny, 35, a father of two living in a Moscow suburb, began his anti-corruption crusade in 2007, buying up shares at state controlled companies and asking questions at their annual general meetings.

Realising the power of the Internet well before the Russian elite, he published reports alleging corruption and mass embezzlement at the giant enterprises on his Rospil website (Rospil.info), which gradually became a sensation.

His personal blog on Live Journal (navalny.livejournal.com) is also one of Russia’s most popular, with punchy opinions and competitions for anti-Putin posters and videos.

It was Navalny who dreamt up an infectious slogan calling Putin’s ruling United Russia party “the party of swindlers and thieves”, which it has never managed to live down.

“It completely destroyed the party’s prospects, even though formally it won the elections,” Navalny wrote in Vedomosti business daily this month.

Riding the wave of discontent at December’s fraud-tainted parliamentary polls, he spoke at a rally the next day that ended in a police crackdown and 15-day sentences for around 70 people, including Navalny.

When he came out, he hugged his wife in front of a battery of television cameras and hailed a “new Russia”.

“They jailed a blogger. He came out as a future Russian president,” satirist and columnist Viktor Shenderovich wrote after Navalny was released. Later that month, the Vedomosti daily named him politician of the year.

Nevertheless, his apparent nationalist views trouble many liberals.

Navalny coined a slogan that Russia should stop “feeding” the North Caucasus, words that roused the crowds at an ultra-right Russian March where he gave a speech last autumn.

He argues he is no bigot and simply opposes massive corruption in the troubled, mainly Muslim region. But he was earlier excluded from the liberal Yabloko party over his involvement in the Russian March.

“Navalny coming to power with his current convictions would be dangerous. Nationalism is death for Russia,” Yabloko leader Sergei Mitrokhin told Afisha magazine.

Conversely, some opponents have attempted to smear him with links to the United States because he briefly studied at Yale.

Kremlin-funded television channel RT published an opinion piece on its website last month alleging that the United States “sent Navalny to study at Yale university to initiate an Orange coup”.

“I have to prove that I did not send Navalny to Yale?” United States Ambassador Michael McFaul wrote testily on Twitter, denying the claim.

“I don’t give a damn about liberals or the extreme Right,” Navalny told TV Dozhd last month.

“I have a group of crazy liberals who shout ‘Navalny is a fascist!’ and a group of crazy Right supporters who shout ‘Navalny is a liberal leftover’.”

He seems to have alienated the more mild-mannered centre of the protest movement. He was pointedly excluded from a celebrity group monitoring the polls, the League of Voters, which blamed his political aspirations.

Yet it is unclear how far his fair-weather supporters would follow him. The latest protest saw only a hard-core stay for an unsanctioned sit-in, while most white-ribboned supporters warmed up in cafes.

“It’s clear now that only Navalny and (radical politician Sergei) Udaltsov are ready to go to the end and aren’t afraid,” wrote blogger Ilya Varlamov. “The rest are just going to the protests for PR.”