Everyone following the registration of the Progress Party knows what this means: 43 is the number of regions in which the Party must register its branches in order to be eligible to take part in elections.
So, we have good news. The Progress Party has received 43 decisions on state registration. The party is now moving out of its previous limbo into a new, official status. Of course, there are still a few more bureaucratic hurdles to clear, but the main thing is this: the party has fulfilled the law’s key requirement and has already received 43 registration decisions for our regional branches.
We can now place the comma with confidence: register, do not refuse.
The 41st region was St. Petersburg, where in a serious court battle our branch chair quite literally crushed the Ministry of Justice; the ruling has entered into force, and the ministry is now obliged to issue the regional branch its registration decision.
The 42nd was the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug,
and the 43rd—unexpectedly and symbolically—was Moscow.
Moscow has been surreal from start to finish. This was already our fourth submission of documents in the capital: the first time we were refused, the second time the process was suspended, and the third time we were refused again. That third refusal happened a few months ago, when the Ministry of Justice first told us there were no problems and that registration was going through, but after a week of waiting—what seemed like the usual process, with documents being sent to the tax authorities and returned from there—we received a refusal by mail instead of a certificate.
The fourth submission was even more convoluted: the registrar tells us, “There are no deficiencies, I’m sending it to the director for signature,” then a day or two later the same registrar says, “Oh, actually you have a whole bunch of deficiencies, we had to refuse, the refusal has been sent by mail.” When asked what deficiencies, the answer is: “We won’t say,” and then they hang up.
Three or four days pass, then seven; we file a request asking for a copy, since nothing is arriving by mail. More waiting—and then on Thursday we come for the promised refusal, only to be told they will not issue it. Instead, they say: come back tomorrow for your certificate, your registration has been approved.
To be honest, we didn’t believe it. After the third refusal, exactly the same thing had happened: they called Nikolai Lyaskin, the head of the Moscow branch, and told him in almost the same words, “Come in, your certificate is ready, you need to collect it,” refusing even to discuss any refusal. We arrived and discovered they were trying to hand us a certificate for Narodny Alyans (People’s Alliance). To clarify: not for our party, but for that other one—the one renamed from the fake party “Rodnaya Strana” (“Native Country”).
So this time our lawyer politely explained: yes, we’ve seen this before, we don’t need your certificate, just give us the refusal; you’ve been holding it for two weeks, and if you don’t provide it, we’ll go to court. Ever since the Ministry of Justice lost to us in the Supreme Court, the words “court” and “Progress Party” have had a sobering effect on them, so a deputy head comes down and says, “Don’t worry, there will be a certificate—we won’t deceive you this time.” You can understand why we still didn’t believe them.
We wait a day, then two—and there it is, the certificate!
Honestly, you almost feel sorry for these people; probably no other Ministry of Justice would allow itself to bend so spinelessly. What comes next?
There is still a lot to do: obtaining the paper certificate in St. Petersburg, then submitting all 43 paper certificates to the Ministry of Justice. Only after that, under the law, the ministry will spend a month reviewing them, and then it will be required to include us in the register of parties entitled to participate in elections by nominating candidates and party lists.
Even on what seems like a short stretch of road, many obstacles still await us. For example, yesterday one of the disgusting little Kremlin newspapers wrote that, supposedly, the Ministry of Justice will not accept registration certificates obtained after the six-month deadline in regions where the party had not previously been registered. More broadly, there are all sorts of hints that, despite obtaining 43 registrations, some of the certificates will somehow be treated as “second-class” and disregarded.
Our answer is simple: under the law, the six-month registration period was extended for the duration of court proceedings challenging refusals and for the duration of any registration suspensions.
Clause 7 of Article 15 of the law “On Political Parties” states this directly: the registration period is extended if at least one of these conditions applies—court proceedings or suspensions.
Our registration process was underway simultaneously in 60 regions, and it continued there beyond the six-month period. Registration has been suspended in several federal subjects at once—Leningrad Region, Tatarstan, and Buryatia—and all of those suspensions run until November 20. As for court cases challenging refusals, from the second through the fourth submissions there have been around 120 in total, and only a few of them, as in St. Petersburg, have been concluded.
It would be very strange to imagine the Ministry of Justice sorting through registration certificates for regional branches and saying: this one is good, we’ll accept it, but that one is “second-class” and we won’t. It is absurd, of course: how could a party that has fulfilled every legal requirement and received 43 certificates from that very same ministry possibly be barred from elections?
Still, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. It is unlikely that the Ministry of Justice will ultimately take such an obviously unprofessional step—everyone can see that the whole affair is ugly and smells even worse than the theft of our name by a fake party, and that it is aimed at only one thing: slowing down registration.
Let’s hope reason prevails, because by now it is clear to everyone that refusing registration is no longer an option, and our legal tank—the legal department—has already smashed through every bureaucratic wall.
Let’s sum up the interim results of the second stage: as of today, more than 200 sets of documents have been submitted to regional Ministries of Justice, and around 160 refusals have already been received. Registration was pursued in 60 regions; it has been completed in 43 and is still ongoing in 17 more. It does not matter what kind of refusal “records” the regional ministries are prepared to set—we will complete registration in every one of them.
We did the math: the first 15 certificates were obtained on the third attempt on average, the rest on the fourth, and for the remaining regions we are already submitting a fifth set of documents. Omsk Region set the record, with five refusals to its name: first a refusal, second a suspension, third a refusal, fourth another suspension, and fifth yet another refusal.
Once again: 43. As soon as we receive the documents from St. Petersburg, we will submit everything to the Ministry of Justice. We won’t make predictions, but we expect this to happen within the next month.
Congratulations to our party members: through our shared efforts, we have passed this stage—if not the final one, then an immensely important one in principle—and we are now on the home stretch of registration.
Many thanks to everyone doing this colossal work and refusing to give up. Special greetings and thanks to Dmitry Krainev. He deserves a medal: “For the Capture of the Ministry of Justice.”