By-elections to the Samara Duma were postponed indefinitely

Yesterday it became completely clear: on December 2 in Samara there will be no by-elections to the City Duma in five districts that became vacant after several deputies left for the regional parliament: the regional court refused to satisfy the request of the regional branch of the Yabloko party to appoint a campaign. A similar situation is developing in Togliatti, where three people left the local duma for the regional one. According to experts, by-elections in these cities will not be held in March: the authorities will most likely consider it inappropriate to combine local elections with presidential ones. As a result, voters in eight constituencies in two cities will be left without their representatives in parliament for a year and a half. Yesterday, the Samara regional court refused to satisfy the demand of the regional branch of the Yabloko party, which sought to call by-elections to the City Duma. Then Mikhail Matveev, Mikhail Degtyarev, Alexander Erisov, Viktor Voropaev and Oleg Borisov left the municipal parliament for the regional parliament. Back in the spring, Sergei Semchenko, who headed the city election commission at that time, said that additional elections to the city legislative body should be held on December 2, that is, simultaneously with the elections to the State Duma of the Russian Federation. However, within the time limits established by law, neither the deputies nor the city electoral commission took advantage of the right to call by-elections to the municipal duma: the former were unable to gather a quorum to resolve the issue (at the beginning of September, 10 people’s representatives, led by Speaker Vitaly Ilyin, were on a business trip in Stuttgart. - Kommersant ), the second considered it incorrect to combine a large-scale campaign for elections to the State Duma and local by-elections. As a result, Yabloko intervened in the process, deciding, according to the secretary of the regional committee of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation Andrei Shebeko, in this way “to remind voters of themselves before the State Duma elections,” while “they really raised an important issue.”
“We have not yet been given the reasoning part of the court’s decision, so I can’t yet say whether we will challenge it,” Igor Ermolenko, head of the Yabloko regional department, told Kommersant. “But even if we do this and win in the Supreme Court, calling by-elections on December 2 will no longer be rational: the deadlines for the formation of election commissions will be violated.” “For now, the prospects are such that by-elections will not be scheduled for December,” he noted. Mr. Ermolenko does not rule out that the postponement of the campaign to March (the time of the presidential elections in the country - Kommersant) “is due to political reasons.” “There are fears that if the campaign is held in December, the mayor of the city, Viktor Tarkhov, will be able to have a certain informational and propaganda influence on its course, and if it is postponed until March, Tarkhov’s popularity may decrease somewhat,” he said, meaning that now The PR activity of the mayor, who is also the leader of the regional spravorossov, is great, and at the time of the presidential elections in the Russian Federation, he will have fewer opportunities to campaign in favor of candidates loyal to him.
A situation similar to Samara has developed in the Togliatti City Duma, from where three deputies left for the provincial parliament in March: Sergei Andreev, Andrei Pershin and Vladimir Yarkin. However, by-elections have not yet been scheduled in Togliatti. There, the local Duma was unable to make an appropriate decision due to internal parliamentary conflicts. In addition, since the spring, the Duma, whose meetings have been postponed more than once due to lack of quorum, has been unable to form a city election committee, which should conduct the campaign. Mr. Andreev tried to call by-elections to the local legislative body through the court, but his application was recently denied: the grounds are not yet clear, since there is also no reasoning part of the court’s decision yet. “Of course, it would be more logical to hold by-elections to the Samara and Togliatti Dumas in December. However, the situation is such that they will probably be held in March or even October, so as not to combine them with the presidential elections in the spring, says Mikhail Degtyarev, coordinator of the regional branch of the LDPR. “If neither the Dumas themselves nor the city electoral commission in Samara want to set a date for by-elections, obviously there is no political will for this.” In his assessment, delaying the process of replenishing the two municipal parliaments “is beneficial to many, primarily deputies who want to maintain the parity of forces that already exists in their thoughts, which may be violated after by-elections.” According to the law, additional elections to the Samara and Tolyatti Dumas can indeed be scheduled for March 2008. “By-elections are held no later than a year after the end of the term of office of the deputies who went to the provincial Duma,” explained Tadeusz Ovsyany, secretary of the Samara city election commission, noting that next March is ideal for this. Meanwhile, according to Tatyana Bratchikova, vice-speaker of the Samara Duma, as a result, both local campaigns will most likely be postponed to October 2008, since combining by-elections with the presidential elections is “hardly possible.” And in this case, additional staffing of the Samara parliament loses its meaning altogether, since the powers of the current composition of the deputy corps end in 2009.
Liliya Abdullina

Kommersant (Samara) No. 182 from 05.10.2007

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