Translated material
Kasyanov left Mironov...
Not all parliamentary candidates “survived” to see the end of the election campaign
The current Duma election campaign has not been without a massive exodus of candidates from party lists. True, the scale of candidates’ voluntary refusal to stand does not threaten the legitimacy of party lists or the removal of the parties themselves from elections.Yesterday, as predicted by the Vremya Novostey newspaper, the court removed the leader of the A Just Russia list for the Stavropol Territory (the only region of the Russian Federation where this party won the parliamentary elections against United Russia), Mayor of Stavropol Dmitry Kuzmin, from the elections. This is a very noticeable, but far from the first loss in the party, which quite recently Kremlin officials openly called the second party in power.
Another mass exodus from the A Just Russia party occurred at the end of last week in the Kirov region. Immediately after President Vladimir Putin’s speech at the forum of his supporters in Luzhniki, the regional troika unanimously announced their withdrawal from the ranks of the Social Revolutionaries. Igor Kasyanov, Vladimir Sizov and Savely Ermoshin motivated their position by the fact that they do not want to confront the party in power, whose list is headed by the popularly beloved guarantor of the Constitution. “The fight against United Russia is a fight against Putin, it is a split in Russia, it is a danger of returning to the 90s,” said Mr. Kasyanov, who “correctly” grasped the essence of the political moment in this regard. The schismatics managed to drag along an entire regional branch of 3 thousand people. They called on their former party members to vote for United Russia on December 2.
This is not the first time that entire branches have left A Just Russia. Sverdlovsk regional leader Yevgeny Roizman left the party before the start of the campaign, offended that he was not included in the lists. At the same time, he claimed that together with him, another 4 thousand people wrote a statement about leaving A Just Russia. The head of the Amur branch, Vladimir Kulinich, left the backbone of the regional party structure. In order to support Mr. Putin’s course, Sergei Mironov’s party was also left by the deputy chairman of the Nizhny Novgorod branch of the party, Nikolai Leshkov (and with him another 1.5 thousand people), as well as the heads of a number of district branches in the Komi Republic. And Aleksey Trofimov, a member of the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly from A Just Russia, had previously proposed that the party dissolve itself and withdraw from participation in the elections.
However, the Social Revolutionaries did not follow this advice and now will not follow it, since November 26 was the last date when the party could voluntarily withdraw from the election race by withdrawing its list. Now the last opportunity to withdraw is available only to individual fighters for mandates, who can withdraw from the political struggle until November 30 “if there are compelling circumstances.”
Until November 16, it was possible to withdraw from the race without explanation, and many took advantage of this right. According to the Central Election Commission, the largest number of candidates for Duma seats were excluded from the list of the Democratic Party - 29 people, mainly by decision of the party members themselves. United Russia suffered the least losses: only one candidate left its list, after which there were 599 instead of 600. Three candidates dropped out of the LDPR, two of them were in the first places of the regional lists. However, the greatest interest all this time was caused by leaks of candidates from the Union of Right Forces and A Just Russia. Each such exception was accompanied by comments on the topic of “the collapse of the party.” Meanwhile, only nine people left the SPS list (seven of them were members of regional troikas), which corresponds to 3% of the total composition of the list. And “A Just Russia” lost, if we count the Kirov trio, 14 people - a little more than 2% of the list. In order for a party to be removed from the elections, at least 20% of candidates must withdraw from participation in the campaign.
General Director of the Center for Political Current Affairs Mikhail Vinogradov considers the early removal from the race of members of both parties “a phenomenon of the same order.” “Obviously, there were conflicts in A Just Russia, since the party is complex,” Mr. Vinogradov told a Vremya Novostei correspondent. — It is also obvious that there is pressure from the rival party to stimulate splits into “A Just Russia” and, to a greater extent, into the Union of Rightist Forces. However, if you don’t turn this into some kind of super informational occasion, then all this will not have an impact on the election results.”
So, members of precinct election commissions will suffer the most from these scandals. It is already too late to reprint the ballots, and election commission workers will have to manually delete from the ballots in the regions in the days remaining before the elections the leaders of local lists who have changed their minds about running for the Duma.