Translated material
Semi-final
Vladimir Putin held consultations on candidates for mayor of Moscow
On Friday, the discussion of candidates for the post of Moscow mayor entered the semi-final stage - Prime Minister Vladimir Putin visited President Dmitry Medvedev at his Gorki-9 residence. According to the Kremlin press service, among other things, candidates for the post of the capital's mayor were discussed. A little later, the prime minister himself received activists of the United Russia party he headed in Novo-Ogarevo. This stage should also be recognized as semi-public - although the general public was informed about the very fact of consultations on the candidacies of the Moscow mayor at the highest level, there is still no information about possible candidates. United Russia is not going to rush to make it public - from a wide list they will select three or four successors to Yuri Luzhkov and present them to the president no later than October 11.On Friday evening, the top leadership of United Russia gathered in Novo-Ogaryovo: party leader, also Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, State Duma Speaker Boris Gryzlov, First Vice Speaker Oleg Morozov, Secretary of the Presidium of the General Council Vyacheslav Volodin, Head of the Central Executive Committee Andrei Vorobyov , as well as Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Sobyanin (who, by the way, is named among the possible candidates for mayor) and First Deputy Head of the Presidential Administration Vladislav Surkov. It is Mr. Surkov who usually conducts consultations with the leadership of the party in power on candidacies for regional heads.
So far, candidates for the post of mayor of the capital are being discussed by those who cannot have any real influence on the choice - the press and ordinary people. More often than others, the names of First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov, Deputy Prime Ministers Sergei Ivanov and Sergei Sobyanin, Head of the Ministry of Emergency Situations Sergei Shoigu, Presidential Plenipotentiary Envoy to the North Caucasus Federal District, Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Khloponin, Presidential Administration Manager Vladimir Kozhin, Governor of the Nizhny Novgorod Region Valery Shantsev are heard , the head of Rosatom Sergei Kiriyenko and some very exotic figures.
For now, those who will actually make the decision are holding closed consultations. Considering previous experience with the appointment of senior officials, when Vladimir Putin personally takes part in this process (one can recall at least the prime ministers when Mr. Putin was president - only Mikhail Kasyanov was a logical and discussed candidate), the choice of a new mayor can expect any surprises.
At Friday’s meeting with United Russia members, Vladimir Putin got to the most important thing only after talking for ten minutes about the upcoming regional elections on October 10 and work to adopt the federal budget for next year. Publicly, the main reason for the meeting was announced very briefly. “Well, there is one practical personnel issue. I ask you to hold consultations with representatives of United Russia in the city legislative assembly - we are talking about a proposal for the candidacy of the mayor of the capital, we will talk about this separately today,” the prime minister literally mentioned in passing.
And Boris Gryzlov never said at all why he and his colleagues actually came, instead saying that the party hopes for even greater voter support in the upcoming local elections, “because we really do what we promise.” “75 subjects that will participate in the elections, 50 thousand deputy seats in local governments, 2.5 thousand heads of municipalities - this is a huge number of deputies who will be elected, and only United Russia is able to nominate candidates for all these places,” Mr. Gryzlov said at the meeting. He did not say a word about the candidates for mayor of Moscow. But he said that a schedule has already been set for consideration of the draft federal budget in the State Duma: October 20 in the first reading, November 17 in the second, November 24 in the final and third.
After the closed part of the meeting, Boris Gryzlov spent a few minutes with journalists, who did not ask a single question about the budget and elections, but in a variety of formulations tried to find out whether specific candidates for the post of mayor of the capital were discussed at the meeting. “We have a fairly large circle of candidates that we are discussing, and next week we will continue consultations. We have time: the deadline for submitting candidates to the president is October 11. We take a fairly thorough approach to the candidates that will be nominated, and today we discussed them with the leader, the chairman of the party,” the State Duma speaker answered in an extremely streamlined manner.
A meeting of the Presidium of the General Council of United Russia is scheduled for today, where the main issue may be the approval of the list of candidates to replace Yuri Luzhkov. But you shouldn’t count on immediate publication of names - the intrigue may persist until the end of the coming week.