Nalavny Will Now be Discarded by Western Intelligence Agencies

An exhausted hostility is on display in Neil MacFarquhar's two post-election pieces, "Putin Wins Russia Election, and Broad Mandate for 4th Term" and "Russia Credits the West for Putin’s Big Victory"

The goal of The New York Times/USG was to inflate the boycott candidacy of Alexei Navalny and keep turnout in the presidential election below the Kremlin target of 70%.

MacFarquhar had to eat crow. From the first four paragraphs of the first story:

MOSCOW — Russian voters gave President Vladimir V. Putin resounding approval for a fourth term on Sunday, with nearly complete figures from the Central Election Commission showing him winning more than three-quarters of the vote with a turnout of more than 67 percent.

The Kremlin had initially projected that Mr. Putin would get at least 70 percent of the vote with a 70 percent turnout, and the results with 99.84 percent of the ballots counted were in line with that assessment.

Mr. Putin won 76.6 percent of the vote, and the turnout of 67.47 percent was higher than the 65 percent participation rate in the last presidential election, in 2012. More than 56 million of Russia’s 110 million eligible voters backed Mr. Putin.

A poor showing by the already fractious opposition prompted a bitter public dispute between the two most high-profile liberal politicians, with one denouncing the other as a Kremlin stooge even before the polls closed.

As I read the story I found myself wishing that polling sites in the U.S. could be as festive on election day as they were in Russia:

Local governments tried various efforts to get out the vote, not least trying to turn the entire event into a carnival. There was music, discounted food for sale and games for the children. At one Moscow polling station a woman dressed as a clown shouted out historical questions and rewarded right answers with a chocolate bar.

The region of Omsk offered free iPhones for voters who turned up in the best costumes, prompting a parade of voters who came as Santa Claus or a Roman legionnaire. One family was a hockey team.

The most satisfying aspect of MacFarquhar's report is the admission, in so many words, of the fraudulence of the Navalny phenomenon:

For some who supported Mr. Navalny, the outcome was a stark disillusion.

Ilya Amutov, a 26-year-old software engineer and longtime Navalny supporter, served as an election observer for the Sobchak campaign. He was taken aback watching elderly voters at his polling station off Leninsky Prospekt kissing Mr. Putin’s pictures on the official poster listing all eight candidate and crossing themselves, he said. That is how the Russian Orthodox faithful treat religious icons.

“They cherish and love Putin,” he said. “This is a big cultural shock. Of course the election was like a circus, but it was not rigged by our authorities. It was rigged by our people. This is extremely depressing.”

Mr. Navalny tried to put the best face on it, telling reporters at his headquarters that at least the boycott seemed to keep turnout below 2012 levels. [Which was not the case.]

There were scattered reports of the usual election irregularities, with a few observers harassed or beaten and video cameras catching some ballot-box stuffing. There was also a discrepancy in some places between the turnout numbers tallied by Mr. Navalany’s organization, which fielded more than 30,000 observers, and the official numbers.

There was no real need for extensive rigging, however, because of Mr. Putin’s genuine popularity.

The result set off immediate, bitter infighting within the already divided liberal opposition.

Ms. Sobchak, who just organized a new political party, came sweeping into Mr. Navalny’s headquarters proclaiming that they should unite. “We have common goals,” she said. “They are more important than our differences, regardless of how unjust the government has been to you.”

What came next was like a scene from “House 2,” the reality television show based on “Big Brother” that Ms. Sobchak hosted before she became a political journalist.

Mr. Navalny verbally bashed Ms. Sobchak, calling her a tool of the Kremlin and releasing the anger evidently pent up since she stepped forward to claim the liberal banner in the election.

“It was a grandiose fraud and you were part of it,” he shouted, accusing her of undermining the boycott. “You are part of this lie, this falsification.”

Navalny, after this performance, will be discarded by the Western intelligence agencies that are his primary support.