Translated material
Governors found a filter from below
On April 15, the collection of amendments to the law on the election of governors ends, after which the State Duma will accept it in the second reading. On April 5, Dmitry Medvedev and the first deputy head of the Kremlin administration Vyacheslav Volodin met with the heads of regions, mayors and speakers of the legislative collections and explained how the Kremlin sees the procedure for the election of governors. It seems that it was decided to refuse from the idea of a direct presidential filter on which Vladimir Putin insisted. Instead, the candidates for governors will have to go through the municipal filter: for the nomination, they will need to hold meetings with voters and enlist the written support of 5–7% of the municipal deputies of each region of the region. In addition, instead of two single voting days, as before (in early March and early October), Medvedev proposed to switch to one single day - the second Sunday of September. Thus, the height of the election campaigns in the regions will fall on the period of summer vacations, when both meetings with voters and the collection of signatures of municipal deputies for independent candidates for governors will be as complicated as possible. According to Medvedev, the procedure will give future governors “additional legitimacy”. “The law in the general form provides for the possibility of self -nomination. There is a danger that people will come absolutely unprepared, just crooks or city crazy and village fools, ”the president explained the essence of the filter. Experts, however, believe that the Kremlin simply found the mechanism of weming at the stage of registration of uncomfortable and unsystematic candidates.
If the Duma accepts the law within the planned time, and the Kremlin will not have time to put their people in the regions in those regions where the terms of governors are nearing the end, already in the fall of 2012, the first governors will be able to choose the inhabitants of the Amur, Bryansk, Kostroma, Novgorod and Samara regions.