When the Russian opposition politician Alexey Navalny returned to Russia in January, he threw down a gauntlet to president Vladimir Putin’s authority.
It was challenge watched by the world as Navalny—having survived a nerve agent poisoning months earlier—flew into Moscow.
The Kremlin’s response has been blunt. Navalny was swiftly sentenced to over two and a half years in prison in a trial condemned internationally as being politically motivated.
The unusually large protests in Russia that followed Navalny’s imprisonment were swiftly and robustly suppressed, as authorities deployed police on an unprecedented scale. Thousands were detained and hundreds then fined or given short prison sentences. Police targeted Navalny’s allies with a barrage of raids and new criminal prosecutions, putting most of them in detention.
After two weekends of protests, which saw so many detained that Moscow’s jails and courts briefly backed-up, Navalny’s team called off any further streets protests until the summer.
That outcome has affirmed Putin’s capacity to retain control, but it also points to an unappealing future for the Kremlin, one where it has to rely more and more on crude authoritarianism. In many ways the protests reaffirmed the strength of Putin’s control.
Independent polls have shown that despite the drama, there has been little impact on Russians’ attitudes towards Navalny and Putin. According to the independent pollster the Levada Center, around 19 percent % of Russians approve of Navalny’s actions, while 56 percent disapprove.
That is 6% more who disapprove than before Navalny returned. The same Levada polls show trust for Navalny among Russians overall has crept up slightly, from three to 4 percent.
The polling suggests that the government has succeeded in controlling the narrative around Navalny, the center’s deputy director, Denis Volkov said.
The majority of Russians remain apathetic and deeply cynical about political change, attitudes also cultivated by Kremlin propaganda, experts said, which poses a huge challenge to Navalny’s efforts to mobilize them.
In recent years, approval of Putin and the authorities more generally has been eroding. Putin’s approval last year dipped to its lower level in a decade, reaching 59 percent last April.
Source-ABC
