Is there a case?

Mikhail Prokhorov, opening the second day of the Right Cause congress, repeated that the first day was marked by an attempted raider takeover. However, if on September 14 he was still ready to fight, he expelled from the party his enemies Andrei Bogdanov and the brothers Sergei and Alexander Ryavkin, in whose parties the “Right Cause” was created and grown through labor and pain, and was going to propose to the congress to dismiss the head of the executive committee Andrei Dunaev, one of the founders and growers, then on September 15 he stated that it was difficult to sue “Just Cause”: “They didn’t give us the documents, the credentials committee didn’t let anyone in.” Therefore, Prokhorov suggested that his supporters “either imitate that we are registering, enter into an incomprehensible confrontation, in this sense, set up, including you, your business” (he himself added that he was not ready for such an option), or “refuse to participate.” "in "Right Cause" and create a new party. Prokhorov promised to talk with the country's leadership. “We’ll start with a social movement, then we’ll move on to a political party, because the country’s leadership has currently withdrawn,” he concluded. Apparently, this is no longer the case for the current elections. The Central Election Commission has already stated that if Prokhorov now creates a new movement, then it will not participate in the 2011 elections. Later, Prokhorov himself said that he did not intend to participate in the upcoming Duma elections, but he would not leave politics either.

Later, Prokhorov and the head of the City Without Drugs Foundation, Yevgeny Roizman, who formally caused a scandal because Prokhorov included him in the election list, and the Kremlin did not like it, announced that they were leaving the party.

With Prokhorov are singer Alla Pugacheva, actor Leonid Yarmolnik, musician Andrei Makarevich, director Pavel Lungin, television journalist Alexander Lyubimov, who was offered the post of Minister of Media in the shadow government.

At the same time, Prokhorov’s opponents are holding their own congress (however, Prokhorov immediately said that the event at which his supporters gathered is no longer a congress, since his opponents falsified the party congress). In particular, one of the former co-chairs of the party, Georgy Bovt, and the leader of the Moscow regional branch, Boris Nadezhdin, as well as Bogdanov and Dunaev, who were offended by Prokhorov, came there. The Anti-Prokhorov Congress voted to remove the leader and overturned his decision to expel Bogdanov. Bogdanov later stated that he would remain an ordinary member of the party and would not join the leadership.

Later, the congress elected Andrei Dunaev as interim party chairman. The decision on the future permanent chairman has been postponed for now.

As for another former co-chairman, Leonid Gozman, who was responsible for bringing the wreckage of the Union of Right Forces to “Right Cause,” he said that Prokhorov would not join the new party, since this, in his opinion, “is a deliberately losing task, lost in start." But the success of the “Right Cause” itself, in Gozman’s opinion, is unlikely in the current situation. “We are not for Prokhorov and not against Prokhorov. We are for there to be a liberal party in Russia, for the liberal party to be represented in the State Duma. The fight that is going on now is causing enormous damage,” RIA Novosti quotes Gozman as saying. He, however, did not specify who he meant when he said “we.”

Nadezhdin admitted that without Prokhorov it would be difficult for the party to get into the Duma and that finding a replacement for the obstinate leader would not be easy. Bovt, who condemned Prokhorov for involving technologists from Ukraine in preparing the election campaign, said that he did not see an adequate replacement at all. At the same time, both of them are convinced that the party will still go to the elections.

Truly, Viktor Stepanovich Chernomyrdin was right when he said: “A just cause” - there is no such thing!” This was his response in 1999 to a proposal to unite on the eve of the next parliamentary elections with the bloc, which was then called “Right Cause”, and later became known as the Union of Right Forces and triumphantly entered the Duma with the support of future President Vladimir Putin. Years passed, the Union of Right Forces quarreled and made peace with the authorities, then finally lost its strength and itself became one of the components of the new, very openly Kremlin “Right Cause”, together with the Democratic Party of Russia and “Civil Force”. From the very beginning, the artificial liberal project did not work out: either the wrong person was appointed head of the Moscow branch, or the elections to the Moscow City Duma flew by. The Bovt-Gozman-Titov triumvirate, which stood at the head of the party, increasingly resembled either a Krylov cart or a Krylov quartet. They searched and searched for a new sole leader, Mikhail Prokhorov finally appeared, and potential voters perked up. However, things didn’t work out again: Prokhorov seemed too independent to the owners of Right Cause. It is not entirely clear, however, what he was counting on when trying to win back from the Kremlin the right to decide everything for himself. It's kind of like a riot in a toy store. However, Prokhorov is determined and declares that he will do everything to dismiss not just anyone, but the deputy head of the presidential administration, Vladislav Surkov. Oh well.

Kommersant, meanwhile, writes that Surkov has already met with potential candidates for the post of leader of Right Cause since the beginning of the week. We spoke with former co-chairman Boris Titov, but he refused. It seems that the governor of the Kirov region Nikita Belykh, the former leader of the Union of Right Forces, also refused, after whose departure the party joined the “Right Cause”.

"Just Cause"