Putin foe Navalny nominated for Moscow mayor

Russia's top opposition figure Alexei Navalny faced the uphill battle of getting on the ballot for Moscow mayor on Saturday after being nominated for the post by other leaders of the country's nascent protest movement. The 37-year-old lawyer by training became the star of the street protests that erupted in Moscow more than a year ago by giving some of the most fervent speeches against President Vladimir Putin's 13-year-rule. He drew ever-larger crowds through charisma and simple slogans that branded the ruling elite as "the party of crooks and thieves" -- a catchphrase that has even been mentioned on Kremlin-controlled television. Navalny also won a strong Internet following by blogging about corruption and even starting a movement devoted to unearthing particularly startling examples of lavish state spending on lawmakers and ministers. His nomination for mayor came late Friday at a meeting of the RPR-Parnas party -- a tiny group that includes former prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov. "Alexei Navalny has officially been nominated for Moscow mayor," his spokeswoman Anna Veduta tweeted. "A total of 88 Parnas activists voted in favour of the candidacy. There were eight against," tweeted fellow protest leader Ilya Yashin. Navalny now faces the tough task of collecting the 73,021 signatures necessary for registration on the September 8 ballot against Kremlin-backed Mayor Sergei Sobyanin. Some 110 of these have to come from the 1,810 deputies serving various functions in Moscow district governments. But Navalny's chances are complicated to a much greater extent by a series of criminal hearings that have been launched against him in recent months. Their total has reached about half a dozen and Navalny himself has jokingly said that he has lost count of how many years in jail he may potentially face. The most serious -- and the one on trial now -- involves the alleged theft of a piece of forest that belonged to a regional Russian administration where Navalny once served as an informal adviser. There have already been 13 court hearings in the Kirov region that have forced Navalny and his team to travel outside Moscow and defend their case. Navalny faces up to 10 years in jail if convicted in that case. News of his candidacy exploded across the Russian social networks and even drawn support from the self-exiled Moscow economist Sergei Guriyev -- residing in Paris since last month. The prominent economist and former government adviser headed the prestigious Russian School of Economics until he decided to flee because of the constant hounding of investigators. Guriyev said he was being pressured for co-authoring a report on the jailed tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky that concluded that the famous Kremlin critic's conviction on money laundering and embezzlement charges was unfair. Putin has called Guriyev's self-exile his personal decision and denied that he was being persecuted for supporting Khodorkovsky in the highly controversial case. Guriyev said he and his wife Yekaterina Zhuravskaya -- a fellow financial expert -- planned to draft Navalny's economic programme. "Both Yekaterina Zhuravskaya and I will help him with economic issues," Guriyev told the Prime news agency from Paris. "I respect Sergei Sobyanin but believe that Alexei Navalny is a worthy candidate in the mayoral vote." The Moscow city government said Saturday it had received Navalny's nomination papers and that he was now free to collect the required signatures.