I’m very pleased to report that the Progress Party has become the first party in Russia where important decisions are made collectively rather than by the leadership.
You may remember that when our party was founded, we spoke a great deal about making “electronic democracy” our key organizational principle.
How is any party in Russia structured today? There is a party leadership body, the central council, which controls everything, makes all the decisions, and in effect re-elects itself: elections are conducted through congress delegates, while the central council controls the delegate selection process, quotas, and so on.
Sometimes there is a minimal element of suspense over whether a particular person will get through, but in 99% of cases delegates are handed a sheet of paper (in Yabloko, for example, this is called the “Yavlinsky list,” after party founder Grigory Yavlinsky) and they vote accordingly.
That is precisely why there are no disruptions: as you can see for yourselves, our parties are rigid, ossified structures where not even the smallest changes happen for years, and renewal is impossible in principle.
When I was elected leader of what was then still called the People’s Alliance, I said right away: we must move to a system in which all party members vote, while delegates simply ratify the results. There is no need for an intermediary in the form of a party congress.
The same should apply to the party chair and to the leaders of the regional branches.
Only such a system makes it possible to get a competent leadership team—not one chosen through intrigue and manipulation—to elect new people who have earned support, and not to elect those who have not.
Most importantly, such a system gives active party members a guarantee: work, do things, write, organize. Then people will notice you and elect you because they have seen and appreciated what you do. There is no need to strike deals with the party leadership.
Yes, this sharply increases the risk of regional branches being taken over, but that is a risk worth taking in order to build a normal party.
So, as of now, the central council of the Progress Party is being formed precisely in this way. Those who want to run register themselves (the list of already registered candidates), and the others elect them through direct electronic voting.
Paradoxically, the Russian law on political parties does not allow this. So we are using a principle of “fair play”: congress delegates, voting by secret ballot, may mark their ballots however they wish, but we hope they will honestly vote for those who received the most support in the general vote.
So that is the announcement, and we are very pleased that we are building a genuinely new kind of party.
By the way (announcement No. 2), tomorrow we have a very important court hearing at the Zamoskvoretsky District Court in Moscow. We are demanding that the Ministry of Justice include us on the list of parties allowed to participate in elections. As I wrote earlier, we are currently being illegally barred from elections.
We will continue our fight for the right to take part in elections—note that this is a key demand of the Anti-Crisis March—until we achieve our goal.