In June 2013, Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobianin unexpectedly announced that, after a hiatus of ten years, Muscovites would again be allowed to choose their head of executive power through direct elections. Since the turn of the millennium, Russian elections had gradually shifted from being more or less open contests for voter support, to closely managed referenda over the political line set by the Kremlin (Sakwa 2011). The decision to make the Moscow mayoral elections semi-competitive by allowing candidates other than the regime's own hand-picked, ‘controllable’, sparring partners to run turned this into an interesting experiment (Orttung 2013; Waller 2013).

In this chapter, we focus on one aspect of this campaign, the topic that ordinary Muscovites identified as the most important: the large numbers of labour migrants in the capital. We explore how the decision to open up the elections into a more genuine contest compelled the regime candidate, incumbent mayor Sobianin, to adopt a more aggressive rhetoric on migration than that officially endorsed by the Kremlin. This, we hold, was due to at least two reasons. For one, Sobianin faced stiff competition from the rising star of the non-systemic opposition, liberal-nationalist Aleksei Navalnyi, and had to find a way to outbid him on the migrant issue. Second, in a more competitive environment, Sobianin could not rely solely on administrative resources: he had to respond to popular demands in order to ensure an acceptable win. Thus, the Moscow experiment contributed to pushing the borders of what mainstream politicians saw as acceptable positions on migrants and migration policy – and, implicitly, we argue, to a further strengthening of the image of migrants as a new ‘Other’ in Russian identity discourse (see Kolstø and Blakkisrud 2016).

We begin by outlining the position of ‘the migrant’ in contemporary Russian identity discourse. Then we provide a brief overview of the background for the Moscow mayoral campaign, before examining how the candidates approached the migrant issue: what images did they present of ‘the migrants’? How did they assess migrants’ prospects of successful integration into Russian society? And how should the flow of new migrants be regulated? Next, we turn to the Muscovites themselves, to see whether campaign promises reflected the positions of the electorate on the same issues.