Translated material
Attack on the "just"
Following the speaker of the regional parliament in the Stavropol region, the governor may also be changed
The political conflict in the Stavropol Territory is entering its climax phase , caused by the fact that the local election commission is trying to expel representatives of A Just Russia from the regional legislative assembly so that United Russia can gain control over this regional parliament. Last Friday, the party in power finally managed to install its representative, 35-year-old Dmitry Edelev, at the head of the Stavropol Legislative Assembly.The parties moved on to a public exchange of political pleasantries. The Speaker of the Federation Council, leader of A Just Russia, Sergei Mironov, spoke out in defense of his party, and the Stavropol Electoral Commission was not too lazy to hold an emergency meeting to rebuff the third person in the state.
Let us recall that on March 11, 2007, the Stavropol region became the only region in the country where A Just Russia managed to bypass United Russia in local elections, both in voting on party lists and in single-mandate elections. However, now this “voters’ mistake” is being actively corrected: the regional election commission is insisting on the abolition of the mandates received by the “Socialist Revolutionaries” on the list. The reason for this was a propaganda newspaper distributed during the election campaign, the fact of its free distribution the commission qualifies as bribery of voters. We are talking about the political fates of ten deputies whose mandates are being called into question. If the claim is satisfied, the chairman of the regional election commission, Boris Dyakonov, with his active actions will make amends for United Russia, of which he is a member and in whose election headquarters he worked a year ago during the unsuccessful campaign for the “bears”.
The hearing on the election commission's claim was supposed to take place last week, but due to the non-appearance of most interested parties, it was postponed to May 14. Meanwhile, in the regional Duma, passions ran high. At first, three ordinary single-mandate members from A Just Russia considered it a good idea to voluntarily join the United Russia faction. Then the “Socialist Revolutionary” speaker Andrei Utkin, who is under investigation, and two of his deputies and party colleagues Mikhail and Alexander Kuzmin abandoned their posts.
On April 11, Stavropol deputies elected a new speaker in the person of United Russia member Dmitry Edelev, the son of Deputy Interior Minister Arkady Edelev. All these events forced Sergei Mironov, who had previously remained silent, to come to the defense of his comrades. A rather harsh statement appeared on his personal page on the Internet, in which the speaker of the Federation Council called the “revision of the election results of a year ago” a “dangerous political precedent.” Mr. Mironov hopes that even if the court agrees with the arguments of the Stavropol Electoral Commission, a higher authority will still cancel this decision. “The political games started by the Stavropol Regional Election Commission are already costing the Governor of the Stavropol Territory Alexander Chernogorov dearly,” the leader of A Just Russia scares his opponents. “And in the foreseeable future they will cost the regional election commission itself a lot.”
Members of the commission regarded this statement as an attack on the constitutional principle of separation of powers, which they reported to Mr. Mironov in a response report. Moreover, at its meeting the election commission adopted an appeal to the Central Election Commission. In this document, Stavropol residents complain that the leader of the “Socialist Revolutionaries” allegedly goes “outside the legal framework”, and ask their colleagues from the federal center for some kind of “moral support”. Such a vague formulation is obviously explained by the fact that there is no crime in Mironov’s philippic, but the Stavropol election officials have a great desire to complain about the leader of the disgraced parliamentarians.
Without a doubt, the key words in the statement of the leader of the Social Revolutionaries are the words that political games “will cost a lot” to the electoral commission and personally to the Stavropol governor. It was this passage that was painfully perceived by interested parties. The chair under the head of the region, Alexander Chernogorov, has been shaky for a long time . For the failure of United Russia in last year's March elections, he was expelled from the party, and in the parliamentary campaign he was not included in the regional party list, which United Russia traditionally heads by governors.
Information has emerged that Mr. Chernogorov was not even invited to the congress of the party in power, which will be held in Moscow on April 14-15. The overdue redistribution of mandates in the regional Duma should facilitate the approval of a new governor in the event of the resignation of the old one. It's up to the candidate. One of the likely contenders for the position of head of the local administration is considered to be the head of the Stavropol City Internal Affairs Directorate, Nikolai Goncharov. Like the newly elected speaker of the local legislative assembly, Dmitry Edelev, he belongs to the “police clan” of the Stavropol region. In the Duma elections on December 2, 2008, Mr. Goncharov took third place in the regional list of United Russia, but subsequently refused the deputy mandate due to him, which led analysts to think about his imminent transfer to another job.