A few minutes ago, Russia’s first-ever vote to form a party list came to an end. This will be the opposition list based on RPR-PARNAS.
I say “first vote” because United Russia’s primaries can be considered neither a fair vote nor really a vote at all. The whole thing turned into a farce: the ballot boxes were carried away, and then the results were announced a couple of days later.
Here, by contrast, it really is a people’s list. Anyone who felt up to it had the chance to run and campaign on equal terms, while everyone else was free to vote.
This is what the top three on the list that residents of Novosibirsk Region want to see on their ballots looks like.
1st place — Yegor Savin.
2nd place — Artyom Loskutov.
3rd place — Sergei Boyko.
Excellent. Congratulations to everyone, and especially to voters in Novosibirsk. In this election, they’ll have a box on the ballot they can tick not with a grimace (“the least bad option”), but with genuine pleasure.
Democracy works. I had expected a different top three, but this is a classic case of candidates putting in the work and changing the forecast. Savin worked like crazy, printed a large-circulation campaign newspaper for himself, and brought well-known people from Moscow to endorse him. Loskutov added fieldwork to his popularity in the city. And take note of Boyko: nobody knew him at all, he’s completely outside the “political тусовка” (political insider crowd), but he stood at campaign cubes handing out leaflets and went around meeting people himself on foot—and made it into the top three. Usually, businessmen can get there only by making a “contribution to the party coffers.”
A total of 1,104 voters cast ballots. Is that a lot or a little? For comparison, the real number of participants in United Russia’s primaries, as the candidates who took part in them told me themselves, was about 1% of voters. That’s actually not so small (they lie about it being 11%, but numerous observations and data from empty polling stations speak for themselves).
There are about 1.1 million voters, which means roughly 11,000 people voted—even though polling stations were opened in every school, billions were spent on advertising United Russia’s primaries, with every city in Russia plastered with it ahead of the election, and public-sector employees were pressured into taking part as well.
So we should regard 1,104 verified voters as a good result, especially given that this was the first attempt and we had to spend a great deal of effort convincing people that it was neither a joke nor a scam—that the lists really would be formed through voting.
All in all: this is great, and hooray. Huge thanks to everyone who worked and is working on the Democratic Coalition primaries. Thank you to all the candidates and voters for believing in democracy and wanting opposition party-building to proceed on democratic principles.
The next primaries will be in Kaluga, then in Kostroma.
And in Novosibirsk Region, tomorrow we will formally nominate the list and begin collecting signatures.