In 2010, after the long-standing mayor of Moscow Yuri Luzhkov's resignation, then-President of Russia Dmitry Medvedev appointed Sergey Sobyanin for a five-year term.

After the protests sparked in December 2011, Medvedev responded to that by a series of measures supposed to make political power more dependent on voters and increase accessibility for parties and candidates to elections; in particular, he called for re-establishing elections of heads of federal subjects of Russia,[1] which took effect on June 1, 2012.

[19] However, Prokhorov was not able to participate in the election, because he had businesses outside of Russia and had too little time to sell them, and Navalny, along with Sobyanin, was a main beneficiary of this, according to a Levada Center vice director Alexei Grazhdankin.

[35] The campaign received very little television coverage and did not utilize billboards;[34] Navalny accused Sobyanin for the former, calling for a TV Tsentr debate (he stated the channel is subsidized by the city and criticized it for not holding debates;[36] in the end of the campaign, he called this and a number of other federal channels to give him some coverage, which was ignored by all of them[37]).

[42] He also asked Sobyanin to show a presidential written agreement with him being able to run for the term after he had just resigned, quoting a law on elections, suggesting such a document would be published if it existed.

[51] The companies explained the differences arose from the fact Sobyanin's electorate did not vote, feeling their candidate was guaranteed to win.

[52][53] Dmitri Abyzalov, leading expert of Center of Political Conjuncture, added low turnout figures provide a further sign of fairness of the election, because that shows they were not overestimated.

[54] At 00:30, September 9 (the election count night), Navalny published a post saying, "One thousand stations are equipped with ballot paper processing systems, the results for which we were promised to get at 20:30.

[60] The reaction to Navalny's mayoral election result was mixed: Nezavisimaya Gazeta declared, "The voting campaign turned a blogger into a politician",[61] and following an October 2013 Levada Center poll that showed Navalny made it to the list of potential presidential candidates among Russians, receiving a rating of 5%, Konstantin Kalachev, the leader of the Political Expert Group, declared 5% was not the limit for Navalny, and unless something extraordinary happened, he could become "a pretender for a second place in the presidential race".

[62] On the other hand, The Washington Post published a column that stated the election was fair so the Sobyanin could show a clean victory, demoralizing the opposition, which could otherwise run for street protests.

[63] Putin's press secretary Dmitry Peskov stated on September 12, "His momentary result cannot testify his political equipment and does not speak of him as of a serious politician".

[64] (When referring to Navalny, Putin never actually pronounced his name, referring to him as a "mister" or the like;[64] journalist Julia Ioffe took it for a sign of weakness before the opposition politician,[65] and Peskov later stated Putin never pronounced his name in order not to "give [Navalny] a part of his popularity".