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MOSCOW - Yabloko leader Grigory Yavlinsky is mulling joining forces with liberal opposition presidential candidate Irina Khakamada to create a broad democratic coalition after Sunday's vote. He says he's not yet thrown in the towel.
Despite the resounding defeat of liberal parties and candidates in the December Duma elections, Yavlinsky said Wednesday there's nothing to do but stand aside to President Vladimir Putin's juggernaut.
As he sees it, Putin's drive to concentrate all levers of power in his hands has destroyed the key principle of elections: political competition.
"For elections there has to be a procedure," Yavlinsky said in a recent interview. "For this, there are supposed to be at least three conditions: independent judges, independent mass media and independent financing. We have none of this now.
But, Yavlinsky said, the game is not over yet. "The main development will be after the elections."
If Yavlinsky's coalition with Khakamada gets off the ground, it would be a big step forward from earlier aborted and bitter attempts to merge Yabloko with the Union of Right Forces, or SPS, the party Khakamada helped found.
Yavlinsky said Wednesday he could find common ground with Khakamada because she had apologized for mistakes of the past and had distanced herself from Yavlinsky's ideological enemies, other SPS founders Anatoly Chubais and Alfred Kokh.
Khakamada announced plans to create a new opposition political party on Tuesday .
"We must fight further," she said. "It is necessary to find a course to democratize power."
"This is not our election," she wrote about the presidential election in a platform for her new party, to be called Free Russia. "But we must participate in it so that we can gain an even more important victory.
"If we ignore this then I don't think we will have a chance in the future," she said.
The new movement, which she described as a "democratic, opposition party," will work to attract new people, particularly young Russians, and build on "the energy and initiative of civil society" to change the country's course, she said.
(SPT, AP)
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Democratic Coalition
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