Putin vs Navalny: Who do Russians support?

In the months of January and April of this year, Russia was a stage for several protests against the current government and the imprisonment of President Vladimir Putin’s only opponent – Alexei Navalny. These protests were like no other in the history of Russia: there had never been so many demonstrations all at once throughout the country, and almost all of them were not even permitted by the authorities (Berdy, 2021).

And yet, statistical evidence shows that, after the return of Navalny to Russia, a majority of Russians still disapproves of his actions (56%) (Levada-Center, 2021).

This divide in Russia’s public opinion begs the question of what makes people either support Putin or Navalny.

Let’s start with Putin.

Since Vladimir Putin became president in 2000, Russia has gained significant economical and societal stability, something the Russian population hadn’t witnessed in a very long time. Moreover, the quality of life in the country has overall increased, as the Russian government started focusing on funding the sectors of public health, education, housing and agriculture (Wikipedia, 2021).

However, this image of stability and prosperity the Russian government tries to maintain doesn’t seem to actually represent reality. In the past two years, household incomes have dropped, the price of gas has jumped and food prices have risen (Berdy, 2021). Moreover, in a now-deleted Telegram post written in April, Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska claimed that Rosstat, the Russian statistics bureau, was lying about the number of people living in poverty, saying it is 17.8 million, while, according to Deripaska, there are about 80 million people (The Moscow Times, 2021). This, plus the claims made by Navalny in his viral YouTube video about the construction of a palace for Putin that cost 1.5 billion dollars (Berdy, 2021), have incited many people to turn against Putin and his government and support Navalny, who seems to be very anti-corruption.

Another aspect that distinguishes Navalny is his opinion on freedom of speech and free mass media (McCartney, 2021). This is something that is clearly not defended by Putin, who is becoming more and more authoritarian. Vladimir Putin is known for taking measures that will make him stay in power for as long as he wants. The murders of opposition figures such as Anna Politkovskaya (2016) and Boris Nemtsov (2015), the poisoning and subsequent arrest of Navalny, the beating and imprisonment of protesters, not to mention, the newly established law that allows him to stay in power for two more terms (McCartney, 2021), are actions that keep infuriating many Russian citizens.

However, Navalny is no saint either. One thing that makes people sceptical of him is his use of emotive and divisive language to boost support and his “all or nothing” approach to politics (McCartney, 2021). On a more serious level, his anti-migrant policy is something else that leaves people unsettled, even more so after watching 2007 videos of him comparing Muslims and migrant workers to insects that need to be shot and rotting teeth that should be removed (McCartney, 2021).

In the process of researching for this article, I realised that it is hard to say that there are people that support Putin and people that support Navalny. In reality, people, in general, don’t seem to like either of them, but they’ll usually hate one less than the other. Besides, people’s age seems also to be a factor that influences their political opinion. Older citizens, who were alive long before Putin became president, have witnessed a very unstable Russia and that is something they don’t wish to go back to. Therefore, they tend to “support” Putin more because they are afraid that, if things change, the stability they became used to will perish (Kim, 2018). On the other hand, the younger generations haven’t witnessed a Russia without Putin, and so they are more critical of his actions. They want to see change and they want to experience freedom and Alexei Navalny seems to be their only way of getting there (McCartney, 2021).