— Why are you trying to jump straight to the presidency? Try running in a small region first. — These opposition people don’t know real life. — Let those opposition figures go out to the provinces and see for themselves. — They’re just the opposition of the Garden Ring (the central Moscow elite). — People in the regions think completely differently and have different interests. — Outside Moscow, people would throw those opposition figures out neck and crop.
As you know, these are not just very popular claims — I would say they are the main claims used to explain why the opposition (which people for some reason insist on calling “liberal”) will never be able to make a real bid for power.
Well then.
In a small region where there is practically no internet connection with the rest of the country and television reigns supreme. As far as possible from Moscow coffee shops. With no smoothies, craft beer (I don’t know what that is, but people talk about it a lot), or other attributes of those “idle opposition types.” Talking only about real problems — housing and utilities, food prices, and corruption — Zhora Alburov quickly explained to Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin that he could lie to someone else about his 86%, but not to the residents of Magadan. That Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin has only one chance to beat Zhora and keep him from becoming a deputy: keep him off the ballot.
Everything else — a fabricated criminal case, censorship and lies on the zombie box (slang for TV), an attack on campaign staff, ballot stuffing at polling stations — is no longer enough.
That is why today the Magadan election commission announced that it is barring both Zhora and four other people on the party list from taking part in the election. Apparently they are very frightening.
There are not even remotely any legal grounds for this, so what we saw was a farce no less absurd than the “Darya Timurovich” case. Here Alburov breaks it down in detail.
Suffice it to say that here is a person who demonstratively signed in support of PARNAS on camera, and his signature was declared fake:
Well then, first of all, as Alburov himself writes, this story is far from over.
And secondly, if only for the sake of finally and definitively destroying those entrenched “ideas about the opposition,” it was necessary to do what we did.
I have written before that the demand for free access for the opposition to elections is the main political demand that can be put forward in Russia today.
Now that has become even more obvious, hasn’t it?