Last words

At the next regional elections it will still be possible to criticize the authorities and rivals

Changes in the electoral legislation concerning tougher punishment of parties for extremist statements and removing the lower turnout threshold will not affect all elections scheduled for March 11, 2007. Those entities that manage to set an election date before the president signs the amendments will conduct a campaign according to the old rules. The head of the Central Election Commission, Alexander Veshnyakov, announced this yesterday at a meeting with political parties.

True, these rules can be called “old” with a stretch - even during the last election campaign , which ended on October 8, previous recent changes to the election legislation were partially tested. In some regions it was still possible to vote against everyone, and parties could draw up mixed lists of their own members and candidates from other parties.

On March 11, elections to legislative assemblies will be held in 14 regions of Russia: in Dagestan, Komi, Stavropol Territory, Vologda, Leningrad, Moscow, Murmansk, Omsk, Oryol, Pskov, Samara, Tomsk and Tyumen regions, as well as in St. Petersburg. In three regions - St. Petersburg, the Moscow region and Dagestan - the parliament will be elected only according to party lists.

The next amendments to the law “On Basic Guarantees” and the Civil Code were approved by the Federation Council on November 24 (the Vremya Novostey newspaper wrote about the process of adopting the amendments ), and the matter remained with the president - after his signature the law will come into force. Moreover, starting yesterday, within ten days, the election commissions of 14 regions must make a decision on the elections. Those who manage to do this before the president signs the law will play by the old rules, the rest will play by the new ones. Such diversity should clearly add color to the election campaign.

Analyzing the experience of the last campaign, CEC Secretary Olga Zastrozhnaya said that “the number of parties that did not reach voting day is gradually decreasing,” as well as the number of judicial complaints. In response, Boris Nadezhdin, secretary of the federal political council of the Union of Right Forces, suggested that the point was not to improve the atmosphere of political struggle, but to reduce the number of parties. According to Maxim Prokhorov, deputy head of the Federal Registration Service, who was present at the meeting, after completing the check for compliance with the law on political parties, it turned out that only 19 parties comply with it, and 15 do not. One of the non-compliant ones (Industrial Party) has already self-liquidated.

Most of the difficulties, according to Ms. Zastrozhnaya, during the autumn campaign were associated with the interpretation of the concept of agitation by political forces. For example, in the Jewish Autonomous Region and Tuva, television and radio companies bizarrely interpreted prime time, during which they were supposed to post free party propaganda materials. True, the law does not clearly define which time is considered the most popular, and election commissions will have to proceed from their own ideas. Regional commissions are also charged with calling citizens to polling stations. “In the Sverdlovsk region, one might say, the campaign of State Duma deputy Bakov, who campaigned not to go to the elections, was held on a grand scale and with success,” recalled Olga Zastrozhnaya. “According to some reports, turnout in the region fell by 20% from expected.”

Deputy Chairman of the Central Election Commission Oleg Velyashev said that party representatives propose introducing a fixed electoral deposit for all campaigns and calculating it from the number of voters and the minimum wage. According to the CEC, a fixed deposit has a future, but it is better to calculate it from the maximum size of the election fund and the cost of collecting signatures. Let us recall that now the amount of the deposit, which replaces the collection of signatures, is formed only from the size of the election fund: the larger the fund, the more money the party must contribute as a deposit to participate in the elections. For example, according to the new law on elections of deputies in the Moscow region, the deposit is about 22 million rubles, which is a lot for small parties.

Daria GUSEVA