Without single mandate holders

An inter-party working group created by President Dmitry Medvedev to develop changes to electoral legislation proposes holding all regional elections and most municipal elections exclusively on a party basis, thereby depriving single-mandate voters of the right to nomination.

According to A Just Russia, which was expressed on the pages of Kommersant by the leader of its Duma faction Nikolai Levichev, in single-mandate constituencies only those for whom the administrative resource works benefit. He is echoed by the leader of the LDPR faction, Igor Lebedev, who notes that independent candidates, having won, immediately enroll in the United Russia faction. Deputy Speaker of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation Ivan Melnikov adds that this allows the pro-Kremlin party to get more parliamentary seats than it wins from party lists in the elections.

At the same time, for some reason the Duma parties are confident that the move away from the mixed system to the party principle will not infringe on anyone’s voting rights. But this means that any independent candidate will have to, willy-nilly, gain the support of any of the parties (according to the working group’s plan, all parties will be required to include non-party members in their election lists, and at the level of municipal elections - candidates nominated by public associations) , and his voters should vote not for the person they are interested in, but again for the party. In a conversation with a Kommersant correspondent, Yabloko leader Sergei Mitrokhin notes that today not all citizens who would like to participate in elections are interested in the existing parties. The parliamentary opposition believes that the transition of regional elections and elections in large cities (in smaller municipalities everything will remain the same) to a party basis will weaken the position of United Russia, but one cannot be completely sure of this.