Russia just disqualified Putin’s only serious electoral opponent

Putin must be sweating bullets.

On Feb. 8, Russia’s Central Election Committee (CEC) disqualified Boris Nadezhdin, the only real threat to Vladimir Putin’s hold on power, from running for president of the Russian Federation. The CEC claimed that over 5 percent of the 100,000 signatures Nadezhdin needed to be a candidate were invalid.

That same day, the CEC announced that three individuals would be running against Putin: Nikolai Kharitonov of the antediluvian Communist Party; Leonid Slutsky of the far-right Liberal-Democratic Party; and Vladislav Davankov of New People, a loyal semi-oppositionist party. All three are Putinites, with the first two being deputies of the powerless Russian parliament, the State Duma, and the third being its vice-speaker.

Basing his platform on opposition to the war against Ukraine, Nadezhdin was the only real alternative to Putin. Naturally he had to go, especially as thousands of Russians waited patiently in long lines in the dead of winter to show their support for his candidacy. Those lines were visible to all. As was the equally visible lack of lines in support of Putin.

The Russian security service may have penetrated Nadezhdin’s camp and falsified the requisite number of signatures. Of course, even that wasn’t necessary, as the CEC would have been perfectly capable of making up whatever numbers suited it.

Nadezhdin has been accused by some analysts of being a creature of the Kremlin, but his disqualification suggests otherwise. He was, and still is, a threat to Putin.

Threats to Putin’s hold on power have a way of meeting untimely deaths, and we shouldn’t be surprised if Nadezhdin, like the putschist Yevgeny Prigozhin, dies in an apparent accident.

That Putin feels, and is, threatened by Nadezhdin testifies to the weakness of his regime. Russia’s dictator knows that the war against Ukraine is a blunder at best and a disaster for Russia at worst. He cares little about the hundreds of thousands of maimed and killed Russian soldiers, and even less about the millions of parents, wives, sisters and girlfriends who’ve lost their loved ones. He also knows that his yes-men within the political elite, like the broader Russian masses, are having second thoughts about his rule.

Nadezhdin isn’t the first sign of Putin’s shaky hold on power. Mass demonstrations in Dagestan and Bashkortostan, protests by women, and the continual firebombing of conscription centers show that Russian society isn’t quite as unified, passive and content as Putin claims it is. During Prigozhin’s attempted coup, the forces of coercion — the army and secret police — didn’t rush to save Putin from being overthrown.

The thousands of Russians who braved the cold to affix their signatures in support of Nadezhdin showed that Putin is right to be scared. In banning Nadezhdin from the election, however, Putin and the CEC only demonstrated what many Russians are beginning to realize — that Putin is illegitimate, that he can’t win against a real opponent and that he can stay in power only through duplicity.

Legitimacy wouldn’t matter so much if Russians were thriving. But they’re not. While military sectors have done well — although their growth has slowed appreciably in the last few months — the consumer economy hasn’t, particularly in the provinces. As China has shown, people are willing to live in an illegitimate dictatorship that brings economic growth. But once people’s material well-being deteriorates (both in terms of economic prosperity and the war-induced deaths of loved ones), they will sooner or later ask themselves just who gave the elites in power the right to make their lives miserable.

Many Russians will ask this question and shrug, believing that there’s little they can do. But some, perhaps even many, will see the Nadezhdin ban for what it is: evidence of the emperor’s nakedness. Once they recognize Putin for what he is — a bloodthirsty fascist — they are unlikely to change their minds anytime soon.

The implications of Putin’s declining legitimacy go beyond Russia. Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump will continue to take him seriously, but will China’s Xi Jinping? Will Belarus’s Alexander Lukashenko? Can they count on someone who may be gone in a few months? And will Russian soldiers continue to die for a megalomaniac their women-folk don’t respect?

Putin will win on March 17, of course, but the win will be pyrrhic. It may even mark the beginning of his well-deserved end.

Alexander J. Motyl is a professor of political science at Rutgers University-Newark. A specialist on Ukraine, Russia and the USSR, and on nationalism, revolutions, empires and theory, he is the author of 10 books of nonfiction, as well as “Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires” and “Why Empires Reemerge: Imperial Collapse and Imperial Revival in Comparative Perspective.”