Who is Alexei Navalny?

We would like to thank Prof. Gerhard Mangott and Mag. Matthias Penkin for the opportunity to present this interview.

In this episode of Gerhard Mangott’s Analytics the professor for International Relations analyzes the situation of Alexei Navalny, the russian opposition politician, who survived an assassination attempt.

Navalny seems to be an excellent investigative journalist with extraordinary communication and mobilisation skills, but he lacks political skills and therefor
wouldn’t be a successful replacement for Vladimir Putin. His political platform is very vague and quite populistic, but as a populist he isn’t able to unify the Russian opposition.

One must not forget that Mr. Navalny has a very strong right wing nationalist past, from which he never distanced himself. Taking up the topic of corruption brought him many followers as almost every Russian is confronted with it in his or her daily life. His economic views are also very populistic: higher minimum wage, higher pensions – typical demands of opposition politicians.

Since 2011 Navalny’s overall goal was to bring down Putin and to initiate a regime change – with himself as the new leader.

Putins inner circle calls Navalny an agent of the CIA or the BND in order to discredit him, but so far no evidence has ever been provided to back up this claim. Mangott’s educated guess is, that Navalny receives information from Western secret services, but that he is
not a spy.

Shortly after he returned to Russia Navalny published a very popular video about Putins corruption on his Youtube channel that contains information about Putins time in East Berlin. Navalny most likely received this intel from the BND, when he was in Germany for the past five months.

Many people wondered why Navalny returned to Russia as the threat of his detainment as soon as he steps onto Russian soil had been announced publicly by the regime. Putin wanted him to stay away, and that’s probably the main reason for his return: to foil Putins plans. His – in his view – historic mission is to bring down Putin and this goal can only be achieved within Russia. The larger the protests for his release will be, the bigger the chance he won’t stay in jail for long. However, with the release of the video which directly attacks Putin and his cronies, his chances of being jailed for a long time have risen.

In Mangott’s view, the detainment of Navalny will not lead to a termination of the oil-pipeline project North Stream 2. This goal might only be achieved by sanctions against Russian.

The interview was conducted by Mag. Matthias Penkin.

 

This interview was originally published on Prof. Mangott’s YouTube channel

If you want to know more about the work of Prof. Gerhard Mangott please check out the following accounts:

Youtube: https://youtube.com/c/Gerhard_mangott Analytics
Telegram: https://t.me/gerhard_mangott
Instagram: @gerhard_mangott

 

Bildrechte: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Alexey_Navalny_in_2020.jpg

Credits

Image	Title	Author	License
	Who is Alexei Navalny	Wolfgang Müller	CC BY SA 4.0