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Medvedev launched the election campaign. The elections to the State Duma will be held on December 4. The president also forbade parties to use national topics in the elections. This suggests that the authorities have no intelligible decisions to overcome xenophobia. True, the silence of the topic is not a way out.
President Medvedev gave an official start to the election race. He signed a decree on holding elections to the State Duma on December 4 this year.
The elections, as the president hopes, will be interesting “I would really like the composition of our future Duma to reflect the political preferences of the widest circle of our citizens, the variety of their views, positions, interests as much as possible,” Medvedev said at a meeting with the leaders of political parties. The meeting was attended by representatives of all seven registered political parties - “United Russia”, the Communist Party, “Fair Russia”, the LDPR, “The right business”, “Yabloko” and “Patriots of Russia”.
“Elections (December 4 of the current year) will be a largely updated rules. Significant changes have been introduced to the electoral legislation - the improvement of the political system has continued. The purpose of these actions is that the quality of the national representation is better, ”the president added. True, Medvedev somewhat exaggerated the significance of the changes: the main innovation in elected legislation is the possibility for parties that have gained from 5 to 7 percent of the vote, to get 1 or 2 mandates.
Meeting with the heads of political parties. Photo: press service of the President of the Russian Federation He recalled that the term of powers of the State Duma has been increased to five years, for non -parliamentary parties the number of signatures required to register the list of candidates was reduced, the responsibility for fraud with absenteeism in the elections was streamlined, and the procedures for early voting and voting outside the polling stations were streamlined. “I hope that, ultimately, an additional guarantee has been created for fair political competition,” Medvedev said.
“What must be accurately excluded during the election campaign is an attempt to incite ethnic, interethnic growth, it is categorically unacceptable, as well as any calls for illegal actions. And this is no longer my request, addressed to you, here present. This is my absolute requirement. Such attempts and such calls will be in the most decisive way to stop, and the persons who perform such actions will be punished, ”Medvedev said ..
According to Medvedev, not only nationalism threatens the elections, but two more things - the administrative arbitrariness of officials and the opposition’s unproven accusations of falsifications.
The start of the election campaign without national themes =- the next demonstration of the power of the authorities in working with the national question. The extreme popularity of not quite Xenophobic views is concerned about the authorities. An example of this is at least an acute reaction of the authorities to events on Manezhnaya Square on December 11, 2010. However, the authorities have no clear explanations of the causes of interethnic razor, and even more intelligible and effective solutions to the problem of xenophobia.
Parties of national topics are completely used to use. The successes of the LDPR and the Rodina bloc in the parliamentary elections in 2003 were to a large extent due to the use of nationalist slogans (for Zhirinovsky, for example, the main slogan was the phrase “For the poor, for the Russians”). They dispersed the “homeland” two years later, however, also from nationalist slogans. And even notebooks from the “right business” wanted to use slogans like “Russia for Russians” in the elections in the Moscow Region. Only the position of the party leader Mikhail Prokhorov prevented them from doing this.
Meanwhile, the president publicly asks the party to abandon the use of national topics during the pre -election struggle. Clear logic: in order not to escalate and not create reasons for new pogroms, such as Manezhnaya Square. And the parties are highly likely to the president to some extent listen. Medvedev will go for a second term or not, but to quarrel with the Kremlin for parties during the pre -election race is dangerous.
The level of approval of the activities of the State Duma and the political parties are already small (the State Duma, according to the VTsIOM, they approve only 28 percent of Russians, 44 do not approve). And the fact that parties will not be able to answer questions exciting voters will hardly increase interest in their activities. And to talk about improving the political system, as Dmitry Medvedev does, in these conditions is hardly possible.