The list of democratic forces that will go to the elections on the PARNAS list will be headed by Mikhail Kasyanov. Opposition leader Alexei Navalny announced this at a forum in Moscow.

Co-chairman of the RPR-PARNAS party Mikhail Kasyanov (Photo: Evgeny Kurskov/TASS)

The list of the Democratic Coalition in the State Duma elections will be headed by Mikhail Kasyanov. This was announced by the head of the Anti-Corruption Foundation, Alexei Navalny, at the Democratic Coalition forum, which was held in Moscow on Friday. He called Kasyanov the best prime minister in the modern history of Russia, an RBC correspondent reports.

The remaining candidates of the Democratic coalition will be determined during the primaries, the start of which was also announced on the Wave of Change website at the forum. Based on their results, the rest of the federal list, as well as all regional groups, will be formed. The coalition leaders invite everyone to not only vote for candidates, but also register as such.

Kasyanov estimated the number of potential voters on the Democratic Coalition list at 6 million people.

One of the leaders of the PARNAS party, Ilya Yashin, told reporters that in addition to Kasyanov, the three would include “two specially invited people.” “There is a certain list of people with whom we are currently negotiating; these will be famous personalities who, undoubtedly, should attract votes from our coalition,” Yashin said (quoted by Interfax).

that Kasyanov would head the opposition list in the State Duma elections Yashin told RBC the day before . Deputy Chairman of PARNAS Vladimir Kara-Murza said that the second and third numbers on the list will be “people with federal recognition who share democratic views.” In total, the federal part of the list, according to him, can include six people; places from fourth to sixth will go to the winners of the primaries.

The Democratic Coalition of Right Forces was created in the spring of 2015. It now includes PARNAS, Alexei Navalny's Progress Party, the Libertarian Party, the December 5 Party and the Democratic Choice. Oppositionists plan to run from large cities such as Moscow, St. Petersburg, Novosibirsk, Yekaterinburg and others.

Kasyanov, at the head of the opposition in the Duma elections, will not be able to rally the liberal electorate around himself, Konstantin Kostin, chairman of the Civil Society Development Foundation and former head of the Kremlin’s internal policy department, told RBC. According to him, about 12% of citizens are now ready to support the liberal party. Taking into account the 50% turnout, the opposition can count on 6%. But Kasyanov will scare away liberal patriots - those who supported the annexation of Crimea and Russia’s actions in eastern Ukraine and Syria.

Kostin recalls that the best result of the opposition in recent years is Navalny’s second place in the Moscow mayoral elections. Then Navalny managed to unite not only liberals, but also all those dissatisfied with the authorities, which was due, in particular, to the absence of a strict division along “patriotic lines,” Kostin is sure.

The President of the Center for Political Technologies, Igor Bunin, believes that Kasyanov could have refused to participate in the primaries, and the opposition had no other ways to enlist the support of PARNAS. Bunin told RBC that in the 2016 elections, the coalition does not set itself the indispensable task of overcoming the 5 percent barrier: it is more important to test the political technologies tested in the Moscow mayoral elections in 2013 and this summer in Kostroma, as well as to identify strong candidates in the ranks of the opposition.

Kasyanov will lead the opposition in the State Duma elections