Translated material
Removal rules
The regions began to form the party composition of the future State Duma in advance
Yesterday The Union of Right Forces party lost the right to participate in the next regional elections - this time to the Tyumen Regional Duma. The reason was a certain technical error: the central apparatus of the party did not transfer the amount of the electoral deposit on time - before February 3rd. A day earlier, the Union of Right Forces was denied registration for elections in the Pskov region: the regional election commission identified an insufficient number of regional groups in the election lists of the Pskov right - 20 instead of the required 22 by law. Thus, today the right is banned in five out of fourteen regions countries where regional legislative assemblies will be elected on March 11.The March single election day will cover Dagestan, the Komi Republic, the Stavropol Territory, the Vologda, Leningrad, Moscow, Murmansk, Omsk, Oryol, Pskov, Samara, Tomsk and Tyumen regions, as well as St. Petersburg. A wave of withdrawals from the lists of opposition parties swept across these regions. SPS suffered the most. In addition to Tyumen and Pskov, this party was removed from elections in Vologda, Samara and Dagestan. In this regard, rumors began to spread that the right-wingers were allegedly deliberately preparing documents incorrectly in order to provoke withdrawal from the elections and to gain PR for themselves through scandals. Boris Nadezhdin, a member of the federal political council of the Union of Right Forces, in a conversation with a Vremya Novostey correspondent, categorically rejected this assumption: “The legislation is structured in such a way that 90% of the efforts of party apparatuses are spent on preparing idiotic documents and collecting certificates. Moreover, parties like “United Russia”, “A Just Russia” and the Liberal Democratic Party can make mistakes, everything is forgiven to them. And we'll put a comma in the wrong place - and good-bye. There is a fairly large-scale campaign to prevent us from participating in the elections. I am now analyzing which parties, including us, where they are being filmed and for what. It seems that there is a purposeful rollout of various schemes for cutting off different parties from elections - for the further use of these mechanisms in federal elections. Moreover, different schemes are used in different regions.”
Mr. Nadezhdin believes that in a number of regions the Union of Right Forces will still be able to return to the electoral process - for example, in Samara, Pskov and Vologda. The least optimistic is Dagestan, where the leader of the SPS list in the Kizlyar region, Magomed Omarmagomedov, has gone missing. After his burnt car was found in the forest, a criminal case was opened under article “murder”.
The SPS leadership is determined to defend its right to participate in the election campaign and after the elections in court. After all, if the court finds the removal of a party from the elections illegal, this will provide grounds for canceling the results.
Another liberal party, Yabloko, was removed from the elections in St. Petersburg. “There is nothing new in this,” Sergei Ivanenko, first deputy chairman of the Yabloko party, told a Vremya Novostey correspondent. — In October we were removed from the elections in Karelia, now in St. Petersburg, that is, precisely in those regions where our positions are strong. And all the other opposition parties should have thought about this earlier. After all, when we were filmed in Karelia, everyone was silent. Overall, this is truly a system aimed at building a one-party system in Russia.”
Some parties, even if they are not very oppositional, apparently have already thought about it. Unexpectedly, St. Petersburg Yabloko found support from the leader of A Just Russia, Speaker of the Federation Council Sergei Mironov. At his press conference, he called the removal of Yabloko “a manifestation of double standards” and expressed regret that they are applied in his hometown, where Yabloko “has the longest political history.” The speaker of the Federation Council also suggested that Yabloko paid “for its position on the construction of the notorious Gazprom tower.”
For “A Just Russia” itself, unlike the regional elections last year, where local election commissions in a couple of regions dared to remove parts of the not yet united party, but then returned them by court decision, this time everything is going smoothly. Problems can only arise in the Murmansk region, where the regional branch of the Russian Party of Pensioners refused to join the ranks of the Social Revolutionaries and is trying to prove in court the illegitimacy of the unification conference of A Just Russia.
The Communist Party of the Russian Federation was withdrawn from the elections in Dagestan, according to communists, due to pressure exerted on some of its representatives who left the party list. However, in the end, the communists were allowed to participate in the elections. But the problems of the main left opposition party did not end there. On Sunday in St. Petersburg, one of the parliamentary candidates, Vladimir Soloveichik, was detained by the police for holding a rally against the construction of that very “notorious Gazprom tower.” The communists insist that drawing up a protocol on an administrative offense against a registered candidate Soloveichik law enforcement agencies had the right only with the approval of the city prosecutor.
At the same time, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation does not expect a repetition of the practice of withdrawal from elections during the campaign for the State Duma elections. “I think the authorities are not interested in “inventing” our exclusion from the elections, if only for the reason that the federal level elections are in plain sight for everyone, and the Communist Party of the Russian Federation is an authoritative and internationally recognized party. And I would rule out legal arguments for removal,” First Deputy Chairman of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation Central Committee, State Duma deputy Ivan Melnikov told a Vremya Novostei correspondent. - During all the election campaigns, both at the national level and in the regions, we have developed a powerful team of lawyers; they know how to properly prepare for the campaign and how to insist that they are right if necessary. We have been through all kinds of situations and in this sense we have become more experienced and can already publish textbooks on political self-defense. The main thing: the Communist Party of the Russian Federation is a real opposition party with a powerful support among the population, created “from below”, and not “the Kremlin cried.” We are not so easy to remove. We’re not a file on a political technologist’s desk.”