Anton Borysych is once again criticizing the initiative to introduce a visa regime with the countries of Central Asia and, at the same time, comparing stadiums and mosques. It’s quite an interesting piece—give it a read.
In particular, he compares the pace of voting for my initiative on official cars with the pace of voting on visas. From this, he concludes that a law introducing visas has no public support.
I obviously disagree here, and my view is based not only on sociological research, but also on the many meetings with voters held last year. Visas were one of the program’s provisions that consistently received unanimous support.
And the visa initiative is moving forward much more slowly than the “cars” initiative for several reasons:
- I (an idiot) didn’t promote it and didn’t mention it at all for several months; - there is a high level of disappointment with voting on the Russian Public Initiative platform (ROI) in general. Many have started to see it as pointless (I’ll write about that separately); - over the past year, people’s faith that anything can be changed from the bottom up has generally declined. They see utter hell and chaos around them, so they grow despondent and sink into apathy.
Basically, there is only one way to prove Anton Borisovich wrong: collect those 100,000 votes. We’re already close to 70,000, but time is seriously running out:
What Nosik is unquestionably right about is that if we fail to collect 100,000 votes in time, it will be taken as proof that this idea lacks “popular support,” which would be very bad and completely contrary to reality.
So, citizens, recover your password for the Russian Public Initiative platform (ROI) and please vote. If you’ve already voted, bring in one more person. Then everything will work out, and we can begin building the legislative framework needed to protect Anton Borisovich Nosik from an excessive number of migrants.