The status of primaries

The Committee of Civil Initiatives, headed by Alexei Kudrin, published a new report with an analysis of the preliminary domestic voting of United Russia this year on the eve of a single voting day of 2017.

The main object of the study is the United Russia party, since only it organized the primaries before the September elections. Although last year, before the election to the State Duma, preliminary voting was also organized in Parnas and Green Alliance.

The Committee experts noted that on the eve of the 2017 elections, the process of spreading intra -party voting practice continued. According to KGI experts, the primaries demonstrated the crisis position of most parties after the 2016 election. This is due to the fact that the parties lost resources after their possibilities of political representation decreased. In addition, party structures are in a situation of “psychological and organizational frustration”, which demotivates them to any activity.

Even “United Russia” for a number of elections (elections of governors, municipal elections in Moscow), as the authors of the report write, chose an actually non -competitive and informational closed model of intra -party votes, in fact, “playing the formal role of the design of a pre -agreed result”.

The vote of the primaries "United Russia" / tver.mger2020.ru

“The conduct of voting governors on the primaries only directly at conferences to nominate candidates actually means the absence of primaries as such, because there is simply no“ preliminary ”vote in this case,” experts pay attention.

In this regard, the report notes that if we fix the possibility of nomination of candidates in the laws based on the results of preliminary intra -party voting, this will increase the status of primaries.

At the same time, the authors of the report acknowledge that it is impossible to "forcibly oblige the parties to hold intra -party voting." The primaries in Russia are “voluntary initiatives”, emphasized in the report, therefore, taking into account their results during the nomination of candidates is considered “exclusively as an act of goodwill”. For this reason, according to experts, "there is always a risk that the results of these votes and formal nomination may not coincide and lead to a conflict." Experts, in this regard, indicate that when the parties are ready to voluntarily introduce such mechanisms, their results should be protected by law.

“This can be achieved by law that the nomination of candidates can be carried out not only by the decision of the congress, but also based on the results of the official holding of intra -party votes,” the report says. Such a norm, confident in KGI, could change the status of primaries. Instead of remaining an advisory procedure, the results of which can be ignored, preliminary voting will acquire legal status.

Evgeny Revenko, Secretary of the General Council "United Russia" / Er.ru

Interestingly, in the parties themselves, they are ambiguous of primaries. Deputy Secretary of the General Council of United Russia, Yevgeny Revenko, told Izvestia that KGI was offering a strange design. "The results of the preliminary voting are fixed as mandatory by law, but the procedure as a whole is not." “A wide discussion is required here, including for legislative registration,” he said.

The head of the legal service of the Communist Party Vadim Solovyov told the publication that he categorically against any type of preliminary voting procedure.

The head of the Moscow branch of the Yabloko party, Sergei Mitrokhin, called the proposal for partial legalization of preliminary party voting “complete stupidity”. “The primaries is an intra -party procedure. In the end, we are talking about intra -party discipline. People are put forward by party leaders who are elected party congresses. And here the state’s intervention is completely inappropriate, ”he explained.