Translated material
: Other elections
The opposition chooses from itself the most worthy. Well, or the most popular. In general, on October 20 and 21, a strange process entitled “Elections to the Coordinating Council of the Opposition” will be held. Strange - because no one seems to really understand what it is.
Last Thursday, on the debate in the Zavtra club, candidates once again tried to determine this and did not agree on - either this is a structure for organizing rallies, or a protoparty, or a wide coalition of opposition forces, or a tool for the struggle for power. Meanwhile, any of these functions differs from each other. In general, any structure should have, at least, a certain clear mission is declared, otherwise all the activity is meaningless, and a slow action bomb is put into the organization’s foundation. It is also not clear how the body will be financed, how and for what reason it will be to sit, what will be its permanent organizational structures, who will speak on his behalf.
The debates of candidates generally made a rather slurred impression. At different sites, different people tried to show how smart they were, but it seemed that most of them did not want to attract the voter at all. So this time, two different debates were announced at once in different Moscow institutions with different candidates in the Constitutional Court of the opposition, some simply had to be canceled.
And the behavior of candidates is very strange. When the famous journalist and candidate for the Coordinating Council Sergei Parkhomenko is asked a sharp but quite legitimate question about changing his position and the real openness and transparency of opposition figures, and he in response begins to frankly plug and even humiliate the questioner, then how to regard it? A person literally tries to spit in the face of a potential voter. The behavior is clearly unsuitable for politics and conflictogenic.
United opposition. Photo: 4vsar.ru We have already seen quite a few attempts to combine the opposition forces in Russia and almost all of them ended unequivocally (for, perhaps, the basis of the Union of Right Forces before the elections to the State Duma of 1999). The United Civil Front, the Solidarity movement, the National Assembly, “Strategy 31” - all the children of the opposition came out obviously founded, but very squabble, like the children of Lieutenant Schmidt from a famous satirical novel. With showdowns, who is the main one, who works for power and who Rabinovich to whom.
The modern coordination council risks repeating the fate of previous associations - it will inevitably fall into it painfully the motley audience. Nationalists, leftists and anarchists, moderate left -wing, calling themselves liberals and democrats, journalists of all stripes - people are not drill and inclined to ideological conflict initially. And we repeat - no one knows how and why it will work. Glass in general, it turns out.
There is also good news: unlike previous attempts to unite, it is now clearly focused on the initiative, as a wider attention, reminiscent of even truly massive support. It is difficult to say what played in favor of the opposition: either protest moods are really not as low as they try to portray the authorities, and the metropolitan protest was not “blown away” (this is most likely so), either the authorities themselves pushes citizens to activity with their frankly indistinct actions and even information policy.
As a result, at the time of the election on the website of the Central Electoral Committee (the central committees love us), more than 160 thousand people and more than two hundred various candidates registered.
This is perhaps the only obvious positive aspect of what is happening. It is not clear how, but these slurred and even dull “swamp leaders” managed to attract to themselves and to the political process in general not 10, but almost 200 thousand people. Which, of course, is an unprecedented success. And in a sense, failure, since protest moods, of course, are not limited to two hundred thousand. About 8 percent of voters voted for Mikhail Prokhorov in March. And this was mainly a protest vote for the "new face" and "not for these Hari." Provided that Prokhorov is naturally a “bloody oligarch”, a request for opposition and the same new faces should be significantly higher.
That is: the country has at least several million people who are ready to express intelligible discontent with power and delegate their votes with a new opposition. And from them they were able to squeeze out only a couple of hundred thousand - not the best result. Although already the result. It must be thought that in the event of a continuation of more or less intelligible work, the opposition, if it does not take power (with difficulty), will at least contribute to the transformation of the population into full-fledged citizens.