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Alexei Navalny is a Russian leader of the opposition against Russian President Vladimir Putin. (Wikimedia Commons)

Amnesty International designated Alexei Navalny, a vocal critic of the Russian government and founder of the Anti-Corruption Foundation, as a prisoner of conscience in January 2021 following his arrest by Russian authorities; a month later, Amnesty stripped Navalny of that status.

Why the sudden reversal? Put simply, Navalny is not the straightforward, heroic, “die for the cause” celebrity activist that many Western media sources have lauded him as. He did almost “die for the cause” when he collapsed on a flight over Siberia from Novichok poisoning (the Kremlin denied any involvement in the incident). However, the “cause” for which he has suffered imprisonment and life-threatening attacks is less glamorous than previously reported. At the heart of Amnesty's new decision is the belated discovery of a series of past anti-immigrant and Islamophobic comments Navalny has yet to renounce, remarks which Amnesty has concluded amount to “hate speech.”

This new characterization of Navalny flies in the face of Amnesty's definition of a prisoner of conscience: “someone [who] has not used or advocated violence or hatred but is imprisoned because of who they are (sexual orientation, ethnic, national or social origin, language, birth, color, sex or economic status) or what they believe (religious, political or other conscientiously held beliefs).”

Navalny's case is an apt reminder that anti-authoritarianism activists could espouse their own forms of undemocratic values. The end of authoritarianism does not guarantee democracy, and the Western, allegedly pluralistic brand of democracy is not the only kind of democracy in existence.

From flawed democracies to democratic backsliding, there is no black and white dichotomy between democracy and authoritarianism. The many flavors of “not-technically-authoritarianism” must be taken into account to understand people like Navalny.

Navalny is a Man like Putin

The decision to remove Navalny’s “prisoner of conscience” status may have been unexpected to the average Western viewer, but, for those who have paid close attention to Russia’s political situation and its fractured opposition, it was a long time coming.

Navalny has enjoyed something close to full support in Western media, with laudatory headlines proclaiming his latest anti-Putin escapade or searing takedowns of Putin’s authoritarianism. In 2017, his publication of drone footage of Russian Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev’s sprawling estate—and accompanying claims of Medvedev’s corruption—garnered 22 million views on YouTube.

Longtime democracy advocates within Russia, however, see his antics as attention-seeking, a marker of the same personality cult that Putin himself has strived to cultivate over the past two decades. Just as often as the Russian president himself, Navalny has directed the force of his searing anger at fellow Putin critics, lambasting activists for their perceived disloyalty as he throws himself headlong into the path of the Russian government’s ire.

*While Navalny is the face of the Russian pro-democracy movement in Western media, his fellow activists have often held him at arm’s length for his nationalist views. (Wikimedia Commons)*

Indeed, his first ventures into politics had little in common with his current image as a democratic hero. Resentful of Putin’s tightening grip over the Kremlin in 2000, he joined Yabloko, the longsuffering Russian social-democratic opposition party. In 2007, the party had to expel him for his nationalist tendencies.

When Navalny first began to gain grassroots momentum in the 2010s, he campaigned on the slogan “Stop feeding the Caucasus,” advertising his belief that Muslim-majority Russian areas were responsible for the region’s ills, and compared Central Asian migrants to cockroaches. In the years since then, he has refused to moderate his Islamophobic tendencies: he advocated for ceasing flows of government funding into the Caucasus to stifle Islamist movements, blamed hijabs for regional radicalism, and claimed that the leader of Chechnya has assembled a “Sharia army” to expel white Russians.

Navalny’s mission has never been as much about democracy as about broad corruption—a fairly safe political goal, and one that can be easily disseminated as a creed to those with relatively little grasp of political nuance. Western media has gobbled up Navalny’s anti-corruption warmongering because it is easier to propagate than, say, the full restructuring of Russia’s politics and economy that other Russian democracy advocates have proposed.

Within Russia, however, Navalny’s fellow activists have not been so lenient, or so willing to sanitize his brutal ideology. Grigory Yavlinsky, veteran Russian reformer and one of the founding members of Navalny’s former affiliate party Yabloko, clarified his position in February: “A democratic Russia, respect for people, and a life without fear and repression are incompatible with Navalny’s policies.” Perhaps, then, it is time to look at Navalny for who he is: a power-hungry proto-authoritarian who seeks to install himself in the Kremlin at all costs and whose crusade for democracy will last only as long as he can harness it to gain the presidency.

Slide to the left! / Slide to the right! / Criss-cross!

Then again, nobody said that democrats had to conform to Western ideals of tolerant pluralism. A xenophobic, majoritarian democracy like the one Navalny seems to want is unfortunately still a democracy, in the conventional sense of the word. As history proves, authoritarianism is hardly incompatible with free and fair elections.

Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi and other top members of her National League for Democracy (NLD) party were put under house arrest only recently. After Suu Kyi and her NLD won Myanmar’s general election in a landslide, the military seized power; in response to the coup, the people of Myanmar mobilized to defend Suu Kyi and her elected government. Clearly, Suu Kyi is a democrat: her power, and her party’s power, rely on the goodwill and support of voters. That goodwill is still forthcoming.

Considering how Suu Kyi turned a blind eye to the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslim minority in Myanmar’s Rakhine State, however, it would be safe to say that Suu Kyi isn’t a pluralistic democrat respectful of minority groups. By extension, the Myanmar state (in the midst of a violent military coup and otherwise) isn’t quite as pluralistic a democracy as Western countries might desire.

And neither is its neighbor. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu nationalist party, the BJP, have overseen a crackdown on the rights of Muslims and have repeatedly abrogated freedoms, including peoples’ access to the internet, during their time in power. But it’s not as if nobody saw this coming: in 2002, when he was the chief minister of Gujarat, Modi willfully incited mass violence against Muslims in Ahmedabad, where anywhere between 1,000 to 2,000 people died. But the BJP, and voters, let Modi stay. Modi and the BJP have always relied on democracy to back up their Hindu majoritarianism.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan meets with President Vladimir Putin prior to the Berlin Peace Conference in Libya in 2020. (Wikimedia Commons)

To be sure, majoritarians don’t always start that way. When Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan became Turkish Prime Minister after his party, the AKP, won the 2002 general election, he promoted a sort of Islamic nationalism that stepped around social and political fractures between Turks and Kurds. In 2007, the AKP won a surprisingly high percentage of the Kurdish vote, and Erdogan even authorized talks with the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which had utilized violent tactics to oppose the Turkish state since 1984.

Erdogan’s Islamic pluralism did not last. When the Syrian Civil War prompted the Kurds across the border to start mobilizing for autonomy, the PKK’s numbers swelled. Erdogan found Turkish nationalist allies in Parliament and cracked down on the perceived Kurdish threat. After surviving a coup attempt in 2016, Erdogan used the crisis to jail thousands of alleged PKK supporters on trumped-up charges. Now, Erdogan’s government is further repressing the rights of Turkey’s Kurds.

It’s hard to see why majoritarians wouldn’t like elections. After all, winning elections is an incontestable mark of a majoritarian’s democratic legitimacy—until they’re at risk of losing. But when the time comes to choose between preserving power or democracy, these majoritarians will choose power. After that, it wouldn’t be fair to mince words: call them authoritarians.

An Autocracy By Any Other Name

Just because a country starts as a democracy with majoritarian values, however, does not mean that it will stay a democracy. Achieving democracy status often seems to signal that countries are reaching some sort of endpoint. In practice, however, the trend of democratic backsliding continues to grow, in which countries begin a process of autocratization, slowly eliminating the democratic parts of their government.

Hugo Chavez serves as a crucial example of democratic backsliding. He first took power in Venezuela in 1999, coming in with a left-leaning populist background. He rode on the anger of Venezuelans over the state of their democracy, fueled by reports of corruption in the judiciary system that the Human Rights Watch noted actually “set fees for resolving different kinds of cases.” Thus, his reforms to the judiciary system were welcomed with open arms.

However, Chavez’s efforts for judiciary reform took a turn when the Supreme Court failed to prosecute a few generals that Chavez believed had been involved in a military coup against him. Chavez began to resent the system he had helped promote, and in 2004, a referendum to remove Chavez from office appeared.

Hugo Chavez, the former president of Venezuela, held power from 1999 until his death in 2013, excluding a brief period in 2002. (Flickr)

In response, Chavez changed the judicial system again, this time in a notably less democratic way. He gave himself the power to suspend any judges and proceeded to fill the courts with hand-picked judges of his own, essentially bending the judicial branch of Venezuela to his will.

Chavez ensured that his supporters would be less likely to question these proceedings by painting it all as a removal of the old, corrupt establishment from the government. He claimed that he was better representing the will of the people.

Over the years, Chavez continued to remove more and more of the checks to his power, claiming that he was only representing the majoritarian will.

This lie, that a majoritarian leader is only acting in the interest of his country, is a dangerous lie that allows a subtle transition from democracy to authoritarianism. A majoritarian view of politics allows political leaders to silence minority and opposition voices, thus slowly edging away from democracy and into authoritarianism while still claiming to be representative of the population.

Race to the Bottom

In a perfect world, the leaders who champion themselves as the defenders of democratic ideals would actually live up to their claims. They would actually defend the people they served. They would never see the benefits of instrumentalizing prejudice and hate in order to win an election. However, we must recognize the ways in which the leaders who help countries transition to democracy are not always the flawless beacons of hope that Western media may construct them to be, but rather politicians as easily swayed into accepting and/or promoting the same prejudiced policies as those they aim to replace. They cannot be blindly lionized; they must be scrutinized like any other politician.

Navalny is one of the few politicians in Russia who has managed to withstand the attempts of the Kremlin to silence him, who has shown the Russian public the corruption in their government. He also espoused Islamophobic rhetoric that, if turned into policy, would result in the disenfranchisement, financial stranding, and even the potential starvation of the Muslims in the Caucasus region. Navalny is a politician seeking power, and, as someone who is relying on a plurality to vote for him, he has to appeal to their interests. He seems to have found Islamophobia, homophobia, or other bigoted ideas instrumental in this campaign.

Ultimately, the most important way for Western media to support Russian pro-democracy activism—and other movements in countries where democracy has been co-opted by authoritarian-leaning politicians—is to tell the whole story. Voters can only genuinely participate in democracy when they have a full picture of the people whom they choose to represent them. They are not automatically heroes or villains. They’re just power-seekers, who deserve the same scrutiny as every other power-seeker.

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