Over the past four weeks, the Progress Party has prepared and submitted another 37 sets of documents to regional justice ministries and around 50 court appeals challenging registration refusals.
As a result, on August 22 we finalized and submitted a notice to the federal Justice Ministry requesting an extension of the party registration deadline, and sent the same notice to all 45 regional justice ministries where registration of our branches is still ongoing (both by email and regular mail, so that absolutely no one could later claim they were unaware of it).
Vedomosti is writing about this today—take a look: Because of the peculiarities of the party law, Alexei Navalny’s Progress Party may still be able to fight for a place in the elections.
Thus, registration document packages for each region have now been submitted for the fourth time. The total number of packages submitted has exceeded 190, while the number of refusals has leveled off at 150. Let me remind you that this new "wave" of filings differed from the previous ones in that we redid every document from scratch—we created new templates and submitted everything literally from a blank slate, so that the Justice Ministry would not have even a theoretical opportunity to latch onto any "old" document connected in any way with "People’s Alliance."
To be able to continue the registration process, we legally dissolved each branch and then re-established it from scratch.
This is truly a titanic effort, one that our lawyers, led by Dmitry Krainev, have been carrying out almost around the clock.
We even have a local meme in the office: "leaving work later than Krainev"—which means leaving in the middle of the night or at dawn.
I know many people will say this energy would have been better spent on something else. But as I have written many times before, we believe that without the Progress Party, a huge number of Russian citizens will have no political representation of their own. The current election cycle—in which the "registered opposition" in 95% of cases simply works for United Russia (the Kremlin-backed ruling party) and the local authorities—is excellent proof of that.