MOSCOW -- As a presidential campaign kicks off in Russia, opposition leader Alexei Navalny announced his bid despite the government's warnings that he will be disqualified before the ballots are printed for the March election.
In a small forest and dacha community on the outskirts of Moscow, exactly 742 supporters raised small red voting cards in support of the whistleblower turned opposition leader, who over the past half-decade has become the most dogged foe of President Vladimir Putin. Navalny needed at least 500 people to formally nominate him.
"Vladimir Putin, you should not be president anymore," he said during the meeting of an "initiative group" to register his bid. "You are a bad president. You have no positive platform. We are sending you a message in these elections and are ready to win."
Election authorities observed the endorsement process. Navalny and his legal advisers submitted the nomination papers with the Russian Central Election Commission on Sunday evening.
Putin's representatives are expected to file his nomination papers on Tuesday.
Election officials were expected to accept Navalny's paperwork, but it's highly unlikely they will allow him to proceed to the signature-gathering stage.
"We have seen for ourselves this year that overwhelming support for authorities simply isn't there," Navalny said during an American-style campaign speech at the nomination meeting, where he was flanked by his wife and children.
He reiterated he was confident he would win the presidential election if he were allowed to run. He called on his supporters to boycott the vote, if election authorities refuse to register him.
Navalny, who was convicted of fraud in a 2014 verdict that he called politicized, is not allowed to run for president under Russian electoral law, which bars anyone with a criminal conviction from seeking elected office. He says nothing in the constitution prevents his bid and argues that he should be allowed to run.
It is not clear that the argument will hold any water Russia's electoral commission.
But Navalny supporters at the Sunday gathering shrugged off the doubts and reveled in the moment.
"The only thing I can compare it to is like a political rally in the West with the confetti coming down," said Danill Bankin, a 20-year-old political studies student who attended the meeting in Serebryany Bor, a wealthy community blanketed with snow on Christmas Eve. "A lot of people say Russians are apathetic, but I think the youths are really becoming active again."
There were signs that this is anything but a normal presidential bid. The official address of the registration was: Fourth Street Serebryany Bor, Beach No. 3. It was so cold that the printers froze before they could spit out all the documents needed to be furnished to the election commission.
"Everything was perfect, totally in accordance with the law. Even the election workers [who attended the event to ensure everything was aboveboard] had no gripes," said Alexander, a 30-year-old Moscow resident who later joined a protest of about 1,000 Muscovites in Lermontov Square. He did not provide his last name, saying he did not trust journalists and was worried about repercussions at work.
He said he was drawn toward opposition politics because of official corruption. "You look at them on TV and you know immediately they're lying. Their mouths say one thing, but their eyes say something completely different," he said.
The head of Russia's Central Elections Commission, Ella Pamfilova, has said repeatedly that Navalny would not be allowed to run for president because of his previous conviction. Yet procedure must be followed, and the issue of disqualification would come later.
"We all know that Putin is going to be president," Boris Stoyanov, a 45-year-old history teacher, said at Sunday's rally in downtown Moscow. "But our candidate matters to me, and I'll stand out here until I'm sure that I can vote for him in March."
A lawyer by training, Navalny came to public prominence in 2009, when he began publishing investigations of corruption at Russia's biggest state-controlled companies. He spearheaded anti-government protests in 2011-2012 in reaction to widespread fraud during the parliamentary election.
Navalny came under pressure from authorities as he gained popularity. He faced countless detentions and jailings for staging protests.
He ran in Moscow's 2013 mayoral election and received nearly 30 percent of the vote.
Information for this article was contributed by Andrew Roth of The Washington Post and by Nataliya Vasilyeva of The Associated Press.
A Section on 12/25/2017