Goodbye, dear Muscovites

Before the Daily Journal had time to start voting on the question of what decision the political council of the long-suffering Right Cause party would make regarding its participation in the October elections to the Moscow City Duma, a message appeared that the party would not go to the elections at all.

The meeting of the Political Council was preceded by a meeting of all three co-chairs of the party with the First Deputy Head of the Presidential Administration, Vyacheslav Surkov. According to sources, co-chair Leonid Gozman hoped to convince his influential interlocutor that the newly formed party should go to the elections under its own flag. His colleague Georgy Bovt shared the same opinion, while the third co-chairman Boris Titov believed that the party should stand under the flag of Yabloko. However, as it became known after the meeting, Surkov avoided making a decision.

Titov’s plan, already discussed earlier at the political council, was that he, Titov, would head the Moscow Yabloko list, the second would be party leader Mitrokhin, and the third would be someone else from Right Cause. Gozman and Bovt insisted that a pre-election alliance is only justified if it is the first step towards unifying the two parties. Then the PD made a strange feat, offering Yabloko, instead of Titov, the head of the public organization Business Solidarity, Yana Yakovlev, as the first place on the election list. The perplexed Yabloko members rejected this unexpected candidacy.

It’s interesting that out of the small number of people who managed to vote on our website, no one suggested that the party would decide to abandon the first elections in its life. By the way, this is precisely the decision predicted by the former leader of the Democratic Party of Russia Andrei Bogdanov, now a member of Right Cause, who is struggling to maintain influence, including on the Moscow branch. Bogdanov dreamed of heading the Moscow election list himself.

Another reason for disputes between Bovt and Gozman on the one hand and Titov on the other was the form of party leadership. Titov insisted on unity of command, Bovt and Gozman argued that in the current situation it was wrong to change the structure. Now, after the political council, Bovt told Interfax that perhaps before the elections to the State Duma the party will be reorganized and there will still be one leader, and someone new. Let us note on our own that until recently the poor “Right Cause” had no problem with candidates for important positions - just remember how painfully they searched for a person to head the Moscow branch after the failure with Yevgeny Chichvarkin. By the way, the current head of the Moscow branch, lawyer Igor Trunov, criticized the decision of the political council and accused his colleagues of cowardice.

The only member of the political council who voted against refusing to participate in the elections was, as Interfax reports, Boris Nadezhdin, the leader of the party branch in the Moscow region, in the past, like Gozman, a prominent figure in the Union of Right Forces, on the fragments of which the “ Just cause."