An election with three winners

RUSSIAN elections are not supposed to be interesting. The mayoral election in Moscow, and in many other cities across Russia, pitched the country into a political fervour that it had not seen for years. The picture kept changing through the night, candidates kept coming out with statements to the press, social networks were overheating, pundits were arguing about the fallout on the internet and in a cigarette smoke-filled club. It resembled a real election.

The Moscow election has three winners: the declared winner is Sergei Sobyanin, the Kremlin-backed incumbent, with 51.4% of votes, just enough to avoid a second round, but not convincing enough to provide the level of electoral legitimacy he had sought. Yet it is more than Vladimir Putin, the president, won in Moscow in the presidential elections last year.

The man who gained most from the election is Alexei Navalny, the leading opposition candidate, who exceeded expectations and polled 27.2%, turning him from a one-time anti-corruption blogger, with a popularity rating of about 3% at the start of the campaign three months ago, into a national politician. The third winner is...Continue reading