Guilty as charged

ON JULY 18th, after a three-month show-trial in Kirov, Alexei Navalny, an opposition leader, was found guilty of a “serious crime” of stealing timber. If upheld, the verdict will bar him from elections, including 2018’s presidential poll. Yet only a day earlier he registered as a candidate to be Moscow’s mayor. This had created a dilemma for President Vladimir Putin: how to get rid of Mr Navalny, but also how to use him to give the Moscow election in September greater legitimacy.

Over the past few months Mr Navalny has turned from an anti-corruption blogger into an opposition leader to be reckoned with. He has circumvented the state monopoly on television news and made a large hole in a seemingly solid political system which he has ridiculed as a “toad sitting on an oil vent”. As if to prove his point, the judge gave him a five-year jail sentence (the prosecutors had asked for six).

Every step of the way, Mr Navalny has turned the situation to his advantage. In his closing statement, he said the trial had resembled a television series set up to depict him as a thief and swindler. Broadcasts over the internet from the court made him seem not a victim of a show-trial but a prosecutor of those who have grabbed the commanding heights of the Russian economy. “I state now that I and my colleagues will do everything possible to destroy the system of power under which 83% of national wealth belongs to 0.5% of the population,” Mr Navalny thundered. Far from putting him on the defensive, the trial has energised his anti-corruption campaign. His latest target is Vladimir Yakunin, a former KGB general and head of Russian Railways.

Mr Navalny is a charismatic populist with a nationalist streak, he is outside the system and is no oligarch. He has a faithful following among socially mobile, young urban folk. His recognition rating has rocketed from 6% in 2011, when the protests started, to 40% across the country and 65% in Moscow, according to the Levada Centre. A large protest in his support was planned immediately after the verdict.

Although only half of the country knows anything about the case against Mr Navalny, most of those who do see it as retribution for his anti-corruption campaign, not as a way to stop him running for election. Yet jailing him for five years will mean that Sergei Sobyanin, the incumbent mayor, wins a tainted vote on September 8th. As it happens, Mr Sobyanin was ahead of Mr Navalny in the polls, partly because Muscovites see the role of a mayor as administrative, not political. Indeed, from a political viewpoint Mr Navalny could have been hurt more by an apparent defeat in a mayoral election than by being sent to jail.

This may explain why Mr Navalny was allowed to register and even helped over administrative barriers created for all candidates by the Kremlin. On the other hand, letting him run would have further legitimised him as a politician. And leaving him unchallenged would not have been in Mr Putin’s character. Mikhail Khodorkovksy, a former oil tycoon who challenged Mr Putin over corruption in 2003, has been in jail ever since and is unlikely to come out even when his second term expires next year. Mr Navalny’s sentence is also unlikely to be his final one. But as he himself said, “If anyone thinks that I or my colleagues will cease our activity because of this trial…they are gravely mistaken.”