All candidates for the post of mayor of Omsk withdrew their candidacies

The Omsk City Council reported that on April 18, the last of 23 candidates for the post of mayor of Omsk voluntarily refused to run for office. Now the elections may be declared invalid due to the lack of candidates.

The competition commission for the selection of candidates for the position of mayor of Omsk considered 23 applications from candidates. Six applicants were rejected due to the fact that they provided an incomplete package of documents.

Of the 17 registered candidates, Deputy Governor of the Omsk Region Stanislav Grebenshchikov was considered the favorite, but on April 13 he withdrew his application “for health reasons.”

Among the remaining 16 applicants, a competition was held, following which the city commission announced the Minister of Labor and Social Development of the Omsk Region, Vladimir Kupriyanov, and local entrepreneur Andrei Eroshevich as winners.

On April 17, Kupriyanov also withdrew his candidacy, also “for health reasons.” In accordance with the approved procedure, Eroshevich could still be elected to the post of mayor if he received more than half of the votes in favor of his candidacy at a meeting of the city council. However, on April 18, the entrepreneur abandoned the fight for the position of mayor, submitting a corresponding application to the commission.

At a meeting on April 19, the Omsk City Council will consider this issue and, most likely, declare the elections invalid. A similar situation arose in October 2016 in Nefteyugansk - until recently, not a single application had been received to fill the vacant position of head of administration, but the situation was resolved.

The current mayor of Omsk, Vyacheslav Dvorakovsky, has been the head of the city since 2012, his powers expire on July 11. His activities in this post were assessed ambiguously. The Center for Information Communications "Rating" and the Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation, in the course of their research, named Dvorakovsky the least effective mayor among all the heads of regional centers. It is noted that with his work he managed to cause personal dissatisfaction with Putin.

In April 2016, the mayor came under fire from social media users who were dissatisfied with the state of the road infrastructure. Blogger Ilya Varlamov referred to him as “a container of borscht,” noting that “it is completely useless to have any conversations with him.”

In July 2016, Dvorakovsky was ridiculed for implementing a park project dedicated to the 300th anniversary of the city - instead of a national cultural complex, only a mini-stadium and a complex for passing GTO standards were built.

In January 2017, Omsk residents dissatisfied with street cleaning wrote a slogan in support of the mayor on a large snowdrift. The snowdrift then remained in place, and the mayor announced a campaign to accept free snow from citizens.