I am very proud of what happened yesterday. Proud to work alongside the people who made it possible.
And I call even on those who do not support my candidacy to acknowledge this: this is what real politics and real elections should look like. With genuine support from real people.
Enough of these political councils of 17 people, conferences with 12 participants, and party congresses of 90 members. For years, we pushed ourselves into an electoral ghetto, cocooning ourselves in “negotiations and coalitions.”
Let’s change all of this. Yesterday, we took an important step toward changing the very format of the opposition and its political struggle. It is hard work. But what a joy it is to be part of it. To stand on a stage and declare, “I am a candidate,” on behalf of the whole country, knowing that you truly are the candidate of all those people across Russia who gave up their weekend morning, went out into the cold, and stood there for two and a half hours so that, at the right moment, they could raise a placard saying: I support this candidate.
Yesterday, 15,653 citizens in 20 cities across the country took part in the nomination procedure. And that is despite the fact that in many cities we simply ran out of voting placards/mandates, while the actual number of participants was even higher.
Across all the meetings, the final tally was 15,652 votes in favor and one against.
I would like everyone to try to do politics this way. Allies, opponents—everyone involved in politics and running in elections. Some will gather more people, some fewer. That is normal. In any case, it is better to hold meetings of 30 people in seven cities than to hold one press conference in Moscow.
Only this way can we bring real public politics back into our lives. We will begin competing for voters. We will work better in order to win that competition. We will invent new ways of communicating with people. We will debate more often—and that will give debates practical meaning, rather than making them mere entertainment.
And that is exactly what terrifies Putin and the entire Kremlin. Only yesterday at 9 p.m. we submitted our documents to the Central Election Commission.
Today, at 3 p.m., the commission is already meeting. We are not naïve people, and we understand what that may mean. Yesterday, Pamfilova (Ella Pamfilova, head of Russia’s Central Election Commission) sank to a new low and staged a farce: all day long, two half-drunk vagrants posing as “presidential candidates” were waiting for us at the CEC. One was a hired hack calling himself a “journalist” who served time for extorting money. The other was a builder who cheated his clients.
The CEC gave them all the necessary passes, and they spent the entire evening running around us shouting, “Navalny is a fraud.” They burst into the hall where we were submitting our documents and staged a press conference. A CEC representative kept trying to seat us at the same table, pretending it was just a coincidence of timing, even though those creeps had been sitting there since lunchtime. Which is probably why they were drunk by evening. We ignored the crooks, understanding that they wanted to provoke a scene, while all the propagandists were already standing by with their “candidate-criminals got into a fight” line.
And today there is a strong chance that the CEC will announce: here we have three criminals who submitted documents, and we are rejecting all three. The media will run headlines like, “So-and-so denied registration on the basis of criminal convictions.” (It will, by the way, be an excellent test for journalists and media outlets.) And after that, everything will be discussed in the context of “those three.”
We can see right through all that Kremlin-CEC crookery and their “brilliant” PR ideas.
But be that as it may, yesterday we witnessed the birth of a new format of politics, and we must never slide backward. The thousands of people who came to the nomination meetings represent the interests of millions.
Today, tomorrow, and always, we demand the right to take part in elections. Today, the question is not whether Navalny will be registered, but whether there will be presidential elections in 2018 at all. That is exactly what I will say today at the CEC meeting, if I am given the chance.
They may decide whatever they want, but we will never give up our rights, we will not be intimidated, and we will not make a deal with our conscience.