The townspeople finally elected a mayor

Yesterday, the chairman of the election commission of the Rostov region, Sergei Yusov, summed up the preliminary results of the Taganrog mayoral elections that took place last Sunday. According to him, “dirty PR technologies” did their job and half as many voters came to vote as the regional election committee had planned. However, this did not prevent the elections from being recognized as valid and the current head of the city administration, Nikolai Fedyanin, being declared the winner. Sergei Yusov called the last election campaign “the most unusual” of those that he had ever conducted. Moreover, both the events preceding the elections and the course of the campaign itself aroused increased interest among observers. The post of mayor of Taganrog became vacant after the murder of Sergei Shilo, who had held this post for many years, on October 30, 2002. The Taganrog Duma decided that the best option in the current situation was indirect elections of the city head from among the deputies and made corresponding changes to the charter of Taganrog. As a result, on November 22, the mayor’s chair was taken by Konstantin Semerikov, deputy director for production of Tagmet OJSC, city Duma deputy. However, in early April 2003, the city court, considering the protest of a group of voters, satisfied their demands and ordered the mayor to be elected by direct universal suffrage. Sergei Yusov believes that over time this case will go down in history books, since Taganrozh residents became the first Russians who fought for their voting rights and managed to win.

On the eve of the elections, regional election commission specialists predicted high voter turnout rates. Their forecasts were supported by data from sociological surveys, during which from 65 to 72% of Taganrozh residents stated that they would definitely come to vote. However, in fact, the required threshold for voter turnout (25%) in Taganrog was overcome only by 17:30, and in total only 34.88% of those included in the voting lists came to the polls.

Meanwhile, observers believe that the little interest of voters in the last vote is due to the fact that the choice had to be made according to the classic “government candidate - oppositionist” scheme. In addition, one of the favorites, supported, by the way, by the office of the plenipotentiary representative in the Southern Federal District, Konstantin Semerikov, did not put forward his candidacy. During the few months that he was in the mayor's chair, he managed to earn a certain authority, but in the end he decided not to confront the regional administration and took the post of deputy director of the Pipe Metallurgical Company in Moscow.

In such conditions, the current head of the Taganrog administration, Nikolai Fedyanin, won a landslide victory (55.21% of the votes), supported by the regional administration and the majority of heads of Taganrog enterprises. 25.95% of Taganrozh residents voted for his main opponent, Deputy Head of the City Administration for Urban Affairs Alexander Pitsenko. The third by the number of votes received was the candidate “against all” - 13.62%, the fourth was the leading specialist of the municipal unitary enterprise BTI Anatoly Syutkin (2.59%).

Despite the unfulfilled voter turnout forecasts, the chairman of the regional election commission was pleased with the voting results. According to him, “the very powerful forces that wanted to disrupt the elections failed to mislead voters.” Sergei Yusov avoided answering the journalists’ question about what kind of forces these were, but said that the Rostov region had not seen such a number of “dirty PR technologies” for a long time. Next, he began to analyze how the main contenders for the post of mayor, Nikolai Fedyanin and Alexander Pitsenko, conducted their election campaign. If the chairman of the regional election commission was satisfied with the actions of the first (“only one complaint against him, and even then not worthy of attention”), then Sergei Yusov called the methods and surroundings of the second “strange.” According to the head of the regional election commission, Alexander Pitsenko was engaged not so much in campaigning in his own favor, but in “anti-campaigning against his main competitor.” At the same time, he managed to enlist the support of the disgraced Taganrog businessman Sergei Bidash, who previously controlled Tagmet, Krasny Kotelshchik and the Taganrog seaport. Having entered into an open debate with the regional leadership during the shareholder war for Tagmet, Mr. Bidash lost, one after another, all his enterprises and his seat as a deputy of the regional parliament. Therefore, he used the past mayoral elections as a last resort to maintain his influence in Taganrog. Moreover, in November he managed to win an intermediate victory in the war with the regional administration and install his former deputy for Tagmet, Konstantin Semerikov, as mayor. Alexander Pitsenko was also supported by the city organization of the LDPR (officially), the regional committee of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (its head, State Duma deputy Viktor Kolomeytsev spent the entire voting day in Taganrog, introducing himself as an observer from Mr. Pitsenko) and “four times convicted poet and human rights activist citizen Fomenkov.”

Summing up the results of the past campaign, Sergei Yusov said that he views the Taganrog elections as a rehearsal for the upcoming elections to the State Duma. In his opinion, in Taganrog “they tested technologies that PR specialists will use in the fall,” while he noted that election technology specialists invited from Moscow “underestimate the Don voter, and therefore lose.”

ALEXEY PAVLOVSKY

Kommersant (Rostov) No. 112 from 07/01/2003, p. 12

Taganrozh residents “fell” into history