Gregory, you're right!

At the Yabloko party congress, held this weekend, a truly historic event took place - for the first time in 15 years, the party elected a new leader. This was the head of the Moscow organization, Sergei Mitrokhin. The election results at the anniversary congress were announced at about 4 a.m. on June 22 - the fact is that the discussion was interrupted during the quarterfinals of the Russia-Holland European Football Championship.

Elections for the party leader began on Saturday evening. Six people applied for this post: Grigory Yavlinsky himself, the head of the Karelian organization Vasily Popov, the first deputy chairman of the party Sergei Ivanenko, the head of the St. Petersburg organization Maxim Reznik, the deputy chairman of the party Igor Artemyev, who holds the position of head of the Federal Antimonopoly Service, and the head of the Moscow Yabloko, Moscow City Duma deputy Sergei Mitrokhin. Artemyev and Ivanenko recused themselves in favor of Mitrokhin. Yavlinsky did the same. “I want to ask you to elect a new chairman, a new bureau, and those who worked before, and me, if you agree, to elect to the political committee,” he said. And he asked to support Mitrokhin’s candidacy.

Before leaving, Yavlinsky proposed creating a political committee, which should control the chairman and bureau of the party and thus decentralize the structure of the apparatus. However, as the media note, Yavlinsky will continue to determine the party’s position under his successor, Sergei Mitrokhin. “I dream that the party can exist without me. If this organization will exist without me, this is very important and very significant,” noted Grigory Yavlinsky, adding that “in politics, the leader is not the one who holds the position, but the one who is the leader, but we must give people the opportunity to grow.”

Despite the last remark, the fact remains: Yavlinsky left. The party, whatever one may say, has a new leader, and in many ways this will now be able to reconcile the “Apple” conservatives and the opposition. In any case, it may seem to many that this is the long-awaited way out of the ill-fated impasse. Another question: why did you leave? Is the inner-party opposition finished off, scared, tired? Or maybe he finally realized that “the time has come.”