“HELLO, Khabarovsk!” Alexei Navalny, Russia’s opposition leader and would-be presidential candidate, booms his greeting from a makeshift podium on the outskirts of this far-eastern city, a statue of a victorious revolutionary-era Soviet partisan looming behind him. The young crowd of several thousand, dotted with red balloons and banners reading “Navalny 20!8”, goes wild. After eight rallies across the country the candidate’s voice is hoarse, but he is fired up.

The rally, Khabarovsk’s largest in years, could be part of an American presidential campaign. Tall and charismatic, Mr Navalny looks the part. Russia’s electoral politics have long been neutered by President Vladimir Putin, who decides who can or cannot run; the population assumes the role of a television audience with little say over the show’s content. Mr Navalny’s campaign threatens to change that.

There are five months to go before Russia’s presidential election, and Mr Putin, in power since 2000, will almost certainly be re-elected. Mr Navalny is campaigning, but the Kremlin says he is ineligible because of a conviction on (trumped-up) embezzlement charges in 2013, for which he received a suspended sentence. Neither such injustice nor the state media’s ignoring of his campaign has deterred Mr Navalny, who disregards the regime’s rules. Politics, he insists, is no longer what the Kremlin decides, but what is happening in the streets.

To remind Mr Navalny of the rules, on October 2nd, less than a week after his tour of Russia’s Far East, he and his campaign chief were jailed for 20 days. The aim was to prevent him from staging an unauthorised rally he had called for October 7th, Mr Putin’s birthday, in St Petersburg, the president’s home city. Instead, on that day thousands of protesters turned out in St Petersburg, Moscow and elsewhere, chanting “Russia without Putin”. Young faces painted with Russian flags or large “N” logos dominated the throng. “Let’s be honest, he’s the only alternative there is,” said Daniil Kholodniy, a 20-year-old supporter.

Mr Navalny projects optimism. His demands seem simple: allowing himself and other candidates to compete in the election, and ending the harassment of activists and election observers. Yet such competition would threaten Mr Putin, whose 83% approval rating rests on the idea, reinforced by state propaganda, that there is no alternative to his rule. The danger of registering Mr Navalny is not that he will win, but that he will dispel this myth. Just by appearing on television, Mr Navalny would gravely damage Mr Putin’s system.

State propaganda has given most Russians a negative impression of Mr Navalny. But the goal of his campaign is less to win over voters than to cure them of their learned helplessness. “Who is our biggest enemy?” he asks the crowd in Khabarovsk. “Putin, corruption,” they shout. “No, Putin and corruption are easy to defeat,” he responds. “Our biggest enemy is the belief that we cannot change anything.”

Pro-choice

Mr Navalny depicts corruption as a form of social injustice, which it is. He evokes nationalism as a force for modernisation, rather than revelling in imperial nostalgia like his opponent. In 2011-12 he galvanised mass protests in Moscow and St Petersburg and successfully branded the Kremlin’s United Russia party as a band of “thieves and crooks”. But Mr Putin changed the subject by annexing Crimea and fomenting a war in Ukraine in 2014.

Now Mr Navalny is back, sensing what he calls “a recoiling from the war in Ukraine”. The euphoria of Crimea’s annexation has given way to disappointment. Mr Navalny capitalises on the growing realisation in Russian society, particularly among the young, that the current system offers them no future. The protests are smaller than five years ago, but their geographical and social mix is much broader. (Some 140 cities, including poorer ones, were swept by protests last June.) Mr Navalny has built one of the largest political networks in the country, operating in some 80 cities with the help of 160,000 volunteers. “We don’t know what to do with all of them,” he says.

His campaign is financed by small contributions, and his rallies always involve crowd participation. Unlike many of Russia’s veteran liberals, Mr Navalny does not complain about lack of access to state television. Instead, he has built a media network on the internet. His YouTube channel broadcasts several times a day and has about 1.5m subscribers. “We are not fighting for 100% of the population,” he says. Historical change is carried out by “the 3-5% of the people who are politically active and can come out on the streets.” It is not just his committed supporters who see him as a legitimate candidate. So do opportunistic regional elites.

Walking into a posh restaurant in the Far East after a rally, followed by his entourage and two bodyguards, he is treated like a celebrity, not a troublemaker. A young waitress grills him about his plans to fight corruption. Two businessmen, who in the past voted for Mr Putin, come up to ask about trade tariffs. After ten minutes of agitated conversation, they shake hands: “You are our candidate,” says one, promising to contribute cash to his campaign.

The Kremlin faces a dilemma. By refusing to register Mr Navalny, it risks making the election look farcical. Mr Navalny is certain to call for a boycott and bring people onto the streets. This, he says, “will create a feeling that the election is a sham.” It also looks as though the Kremlin has decided that locking him up for long periods would be counter-productive.

There are other methods. Besides physical intimidation—in April, pro-Kremlin thugs splashed dye and acid in Mr Navalny’s face—the regime has tried to marginalise him ideologically, presenting him alternately as a violent ultra-nationalist or a pro-American liberal. In Khabarovsk, fake campaign posters said he wanted “gay parades instead of victory parades”. None of this propaganda has really worked. Now the Kremlin is allegedly encouraging Ksenia Sobchak, a socialite opposition journalist with family ties to Mr Putin, to run for president in order to distract attention.

Mr Navalny’s ability to bring the young to the streets this year has been a “cold shower” for the authorities, says Valery Fedorov, a pollster working for the Kremlin. Yet for now he is seen as a nuisance rather than an existential threat. His tactics, Mr Fedorov argues, are like “partisan warfare”: they “can’t defeat a regular army”. The Soviet partisan depicted in the statue behind Mr Navalny’s stage in Khabarovsk might have disagreed.