The elections are over

The authorities neutralized and knocked out of the game “Navalnovites”, Gudkov, Yashin, all independent candidates. Will they come for the "apple"?

Ilya Yashin was officially refused to register a candidate for the Moscow City Duma - the near -roads for city district No. 37 will be held in September in parallel with the elections to the federal parliament. You ask: is it worth it to be surprised here, because they refused independent candidates before, in the same 2019, and according to formal criteria-for example, due to “incorrectly designed signatures”?

And you will be wrong: the refusal to Yashin is a fantastic precedent, during which the election officer referred to a new law aimed against the supporters of Navalny. Contrary to the Constitution and common sense, this creation of Russian deputies has retroactive force and punishes citizens for actions committed before its adoption. The election commission told Yashin that he was “involved in extremist activity” and, therefore, on the basis of the latest version of the Law “On Basic Guarantees of Electoral Rights” (what irony!), Officials cannot open him an election account and accept documents for registration as a candidate. At the same time, “involvement” did not have to prove.

Probably, the election committee here is enough simple meia: since Yashin spoke in support of Navalny - he was definitely involved.

The well -known independent politician and the Moscow Mundy was directly turned into a “deprived”, struck in his rights, and with him all his voters. This did not even require a formal trial. The day before, on the same basis in registration with the elections to the State Duma, they refused the activist and supporter of Navalny Oleg Stepanov, who was under house arrest in the “sanitary case”. Electorate law experts believe that the actions of the election commission are defiantly illegal, if only because the decision to recognize Navalny organizations with extremist has not yet entered into legal force.

But the election commission is not set in order to fulfill the law - their members are worried about the highest political expediency.

At the moment, for officials, it is that no elections should be any more. That is, the candidates will nominate, the polling stations will open, the commissions will conduct their calculations ... Only exclusively specially trained and appointed people will be able to participate in these mourning events.

The winners of the autumn elections after the primaries of “United Russia” are already known, and in September another event will actually take place - the funeral of Russian democracy. During the Duma campaign of 2016, the democratic opposition liked to refer to the fact that the elections should never be ignored, because they may be the last. The opposition guessed: by 2021, the elections in Russia were over.

Over the past two years, the Russian political system has changed radically. This is no longer a relatively soft electoral autocracy, but full -fledged authoritarianism, combining the features of modern China (digital surveillance), the late USSR (rhetoric and habits of the state apparatus) and corporatic regimes (part of the annuity are distributed by state employees - people whose existence depends entirely on the state).

In the new conditions, the elections would look clear anachronism, especially taking into account the fact that in some regions by 2019, United Russia lost to almost any competitors.

Now the “apple” is still going to fight for the faction in the Duma, and the party is discussing strong candidates in the districts, including Schlosberg and Litvinovich. But she already had to distance herself from Andrei Pivovarov, who was in the pre -trial detention center in the case of an “unwanted organization”, to nominate such candidates now “toxic”. The dismantling of the elections suggests that the fate of the Yabloko itself will be decided in the coming months: if the party is considered dangerous for the United Russia, its candidates can share the fate of Yashin.