| The Union of Right-Wing Forces (SPS) and Yabloko launched
their new joint project yesterday: the Joint Democratic Council. This is
an inter-party body to which each party has delegated six members. Boris
Nadezhdin from the SPS and Sergei
Mitrokhin from Yabloko spoke about the body to the media. The Council
will convene for its first meeting at noon today. The following are the
only matters of procedure on the agenda; the Council is likely to take
some weeks to consider the big issues of its own "political survival."
Nadezhdin predicts: "The SPS and Yabloko have fairly different views
on many issues, so the talks will be difficult."
The first task set for the Council by its creators was to select a
single presidential candidate to represent the democratic forces. Now
this task is off the agenda. As Nadezhdin admits, finding "an independent,
oppositional candidate" proved extremely difficult; and now there
is no point in continuing the search, for "technical reasons"
- there is not enough time. Yabloko lost faith in the single candidate
idea even earlier than the SPS, so now both parties will have to find
some other uses for their Democratic Council.
One field for collective action would be to challenge the Duma election
results. Yabloko has collected over 20,000 copies of protocols from district
electoral commissions, as well as several
thousand reports from its own observers on election day. The processing
of these documents is not yet complete; however, Yabloko leaders say that
enough irregularities have already been
detected to "cast some doubt on the official voting results."
Yabloko leader Grigory Yavlinsky
recently sent an official letter to the Central Electoral Commission,
demanding "a recount of ballot papers for the federal electoral district,
across its
entire territory." The letter names some polling stations where the
data on protocols received by observers were inconsistent with the results
recorded by district electoral commissions. Yabloko is
prepared to present all this information to the law enforcement agencies
at any time.
Nadezhdin says the SPS is also working on some "parallel book-keeping,"
and the SPS also has some data to share with the CEC and judicial bodies
- if they have any interest in punishing those responsible for fraud,
that is. The Novosibirsk branch of the SPS has already informed the Novosibirsk
central district court that the law was broken in electoral district No.
126. The SPS representative there recorded 190 cases of citizens registered
as living outside the district being given ballot papers without presenting
any evidence of having been removed from voter rolls elsewhere; this could
be used to deliberately distort voting results. Like Yabloko, the SPS
is certain that the CEC and the courts will attempt to brush aside their
complaints, so both parties will have to put some effort into ensuring
that at least the most malicious violators of electoral legislation are
punished.
The Council's second area of activity will be to develop common tactics
for the liberals during the presidential campaign. Both parties have already
made their decisions on the main issue: they
will not field candidates. Sergei Mitrokhin said yesterday: "Staying
out of this election is a matter of political survival for the SPS and
Yabloko." However, they still need to decide on how to express their
protest against what is essentially an alternative-free election of the
head of state. Even many SPS and Yabloko activists don't believe that
simply refusing to field candidates is a strong enough move. The radicals
think both parties ought to call on their voters to boycott the election
or vote against all candidates. Nadezhdin says: "Voting against all
candidates is pointless. But influencing voter turnout is not entirely
pointless."
See also:
State Duma elections
2003
Democratic Coalition
YABLOKO and SPS
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