Отчет аналитика Renaissance Capital о встрече банкиров с Навальным.
While his public political campaign is dominated by slogans, fight with corruption being the most prominent, this event was a chance for less politicized presentation of Alexey stance on various issues, which I find extremely useful to understand Navalny agenda in more depth.
Below are some key takeaways from the event:
· Alexey Navalny began the meeting by stating that he is ready to offer people and business a transparent political platform, which would represent the widest part of the Russian population. The platform is quite simple - fight for corruption is top of the agenda, low involvement of the state into business issues limiting it to supervisory function, state is concentrating on social functions (better education, health care, transport). He stated that he sees the biggest problem in the fact, that 40% of current Russian population younger than 40 years is looking for ways to emigrate according to polls and he (and his team) want to change the situation in the country (political, economical, regulatory) and create conditions to revert this process.
· Alexey Navalny calls himself conservative liberal, aiming for ‘right center’ part of the audience. According to Mr. Navalny, he is conservative in part of promoting family values, fight with illegal immigration, etc. and liberal in part of lower role of the state in business, higher political competitiveness, wider involvement of population in key decision-making processes.
· Mr. Navalny has no illusions about the ongoing mayor campaign - the chances for him to get to Moscow mayor post are quite minimal - not because of lack of support (since the beginning of the campaign, Navalny rating rose from 7% to 19%+ currently among those who decided whom to support at elections, over the course of the last 5 weeks), but because Moscow mayor is essentially third biggest political post in Russia. The goal currently is to make sure second round of elections will happen (Navalny rating of 19% vs Sobyanin’s 63%, second round happens if not a single candidate gets 50%+). While second round will be a competition of anti-ratings, rather anything else and true outcome of this is unpredictable. Whatever rating Navalny will get (or allowed to get) in the second round (30%,35%, 40%) will be used as a base for (a) getting a prominent representation in Moscow Duma (parliament) through elections next year which will give real tools to influence the decision-making process in the city, (b) build a wider political platform to grow into truly Kremlin-independent party with aims to win local regional elections into parliament and governor posts in the next few years and get into the Russian Parliament with noticeable representation (leading to United Russia loosing its 50%+ majority) at next parliamentary elections. So ‘Navalny’ project will not be over after mayor elections (on possible imprisonment below), but a beginning of a much wider and longer process of building a political platform from below, rather from the up - as all of the existing Russian political parties are built with the goal of gradually and methodologically pushing the existing ruling regime for higher transparency and political competitiveness and winning bigger share of power at all (federal, regional, city) levels.
· On possible imprisonment - Navalny refused to speculate why he was released after sentence. According to him, he doesn’t have a political insight, but truly believes that originally Kremlin analysts did not expect any major reaction beyond couple thousand of protesters and couple of ‘strong disagreement’ statements from Washington, but when analyzing online the people activity straight after the sentence, they understood they underestimated the possible reaction and decided to step back to let the steam off - after all, Navalny has another 2nd, 3rd, 4th case against him during which state has the chance to put him in prison. Currently he is operating as usual - does not consider possible future imprisonment. Even if his first sentence will be suspended, he will not be allowed to run in political elections, but nevertheless he will still remain the ‘locomotive’ of his political platform - through public appearances, debates, speeches, but will not formally run and/or take any posts.
· On fighting corruption in Moscow if he becomes a major - according to Navalny, he is certain that up to 70%-80% of Moscow city employees currently are not corrupt (though are eager to find ways to become corrupt, they just don’t have any area of work where they can steal). So if he will become a mayor, he will swiftly change all the ‘political’ leadership of the city, establish an environment of zero-tolerance to corruption and raise salaries of low-level workers to $3,000-4,000/mo. which, in his opinion, is sufficient level - coupled with threat of real imprisonment in case of corruption reveal - to bury the desires of people at low and middle level management to steal.
· On fighting corruption at Moscow construction business - he understands that the level of corruption - direct or indirect (where, for instance, majority of Moscow tenders are won by Putin’ friends Rottenbergs) - is massive. The obvious thing to do immediately is to (a) halt all the ‘mega’ projects which is the easiest way to steal money from $50bn Moscow budget, (b) initiate the launch of the planning phase, where city strategy will be developed to make sure each and every project fits into the strategy rather a one-off event. Planning will involve massive international consultancy to implement the benchmarking process and drive down the cost, (c) in the mean time concentrate on solving the local bottlenecks without major alternations to the city as a whole versus what happens currently. He understands that fighting, for instance, Rottenbergs winning Moscow contract is not such an easy thing to do - as this directly affects financial interests of the top of the top of the Russian political establishment, but is up for the challenge.
· If Sobyanin will offer Navalny a post after winning the elections - he will turn down the offer.
· Currently already 160 businesses publicly stated support to Navalny and are providing intellectual, financial and administrative resources to his Moscow campaign and wider anti-corruption structures. He aims to bring this figure to 600 - after which he believes the process will be irrevocable as it will be impossible for the state to come to each and every business and prohibit the cooperation.
· Currently 15,000 volunteers are helping him with his Moscow campaign free of charge
· As usual, question on his nationalism, which Navalny seemed to be annoyed with. He stated that his goals in the ‘nationalism’ agenda are quite clear - bring down the number of illegal immigrants into the country by 80%, introduce visa regime between Russia and Central Asian states, prohibit companies found guilty of employing illegal immigrants to participate in state and regional tenders, and change the current donation scheme to Russian North Caucasus regions which seem like Russians are buying security in return for unlimited cash resources. He is no more nationalist than any conservative in any European country. In his view, state is playing with nationalism to a much higher extend - for instance first deputy prime minister Rogozin (ex Russian representative to NATO) who only recently participated in several nationalist rallies, which didn’t prohibit him from taking one of the key posts (in charge of army reform and military equipment purchases) in the government.
Bottom line: my original impression was that Navalny was much more of a ‘slogan’ rather a true politician (which is not bad on its own, but..). After this meeting it changed - it seems we get the first American-type politician, who is ready to talk to ordinary voters, choose language for his audience, truly stick with announced political agenda without alternations due to conditions and bring some true competition to Russian politics which would be fruitful for both Russian population and economy. That feeling of having true political life in Russia did not exist for at least 10 years and feels good to be back.
Hope you find this useful.
Best regards,
Vladimir Sklyar
Director, Utilities
Head of Russian Research
Renaissance Capital