Alexei Navalny, Russian opposition leader and one of President Vladimir Putin’s biggest critics, vowed to challenge the results of the Moscow mayoral election which gave a majority to current mayor Sergei Sobyanin.
According to TIME Magazine, Navalny told reporters, “We do not recognize these elections. Sobyanin can’t consider himself the mayor of all Muscovites, he can’t consider himself a lawfully elected mayor unless he agrees to our demands and allows a recount of the vote.”
Navanly, who won 27.24% of the vote, did not expect to win the election, but said it was unlikely that Sobyanin had won the more than half the vote, 51.37%, that was needed to avoid a runoff, The Wall Street Journal reports. Officials, as well as the Sobyanin campaign, denied any allegations of fraud in Sunday’s vote.
The opposition leader himself had become regarded as a folk hero during the street protests in winter of 2011-2012. But he also became the focus of government officials, a truth become all the more clear when investigators opened an old fraud case last year, convicting Navalny to five years in prison in July. He was released on an appeal, allowing him to run for mayor, but the case is still widely criticized both in Russia and abroad as highly politically motivated.