And I apologize to everyone whom, for the year and a half since the creation of the Democratic Coalition, I promised that everything would be done differently: personnel decisions would be made through primaries, any dispute would be settled by a vote of our supporters, and we would strive to nominate the strongest candidate, not the one most convenient for the party leaders.
Unfortunately, none of it worked out. Those declarations were upheld only until it came time to draw up the list, and then they were replaced with the usual: "I know better than any supporters do—what kind of voting is this anyway?"
Lyubov Sobol from the ACF (Anti-Corruption Foundation) received a final refusal to hold primaries for a single opposition candidate in Moscow’s central district.
This is exactly how elections are lost. Putin will not be the one to blame here; the real cause is a complete disconnect from reality. And for a politician, reality is what his or her supporters think.
If Mikhail Mikhailovich Kasyanov were a great, charismatic politician imposing his agenda on the Kremlin and on society, then one might agree to dispense with competitive procedures. But as it is, this just looks like bargaining away the "Nemtsov privilege" (thanks to Boris Nemtsov’s mandate in the Yaroslavl region, PARNAS has the right to nominate candidates without collecting signatures). Here Koch describes it very bluntly and not very politically correctly, but says it plainly and accurately.
We proceeded from the idea that the "Nemtsov privilege" belonged to the entire opposition, and that everyone could make use of it—that is, run in the elections—and if there was a dispute, then fine: settle it through primaries (Nemtsov himself, let me remind you, was a strong supporter of this procedure).
However, the desire to appropriate what belongs to everyone and personally fill in the district slots with surnames won out. You can feel very important for a while, but the broken trough (an allusion to a Russian fairy tale meaning total collapse after greed) is drawing near, and it will soon soberly hit over the head everyone who, instead of fair competition, shoves fake unsigned papers at us while shouting, "these are agreements." Four out of the five coalition members turned out not to have known about these "agreements".
Go to the voters and explain to them that you are nominating weak candidates who are afraid of competition because of these "agreements."
By the way, Andrei Borisovich Zubov, whom PARNAS is putting forward in the district, is actually a very good candidate. Personally, I find him very appealing because of his fairly conservative views on a number of issues. For some reason, he is being portrayed as someone who is afraid of primaries, even though he personally told me: you decide among yourselves, and I will do whatever is needed in the interests of the cause.
I certainly would not be 100% sure of Sobol winning if they went head-to-head in primaries. But I am sure that for us—for us, the voters—such a contest, with debates and campaigning, would have benefited both us and the eventual winning candidate.
What matters here is not Sobol versus Zubov, but the principle: before becoming the united opposition candidate, you must go through competition with others who also want to represent the opposition in that district.
Even United Russia (the ruling party) holds some semblance of primaries. Of course they rig them, but they understand the main trend: competition improves both the quality of candidates and voter engagement.
And here the movement is in the opposite direction—toward political stagnation and degradation.
It is a shame that it turned out this way. This is also my personal defeat, as a strong supporter of internal elections. A year and a half has been wasted. These people are so afraid of competition that they would rather get 1% in the election than take a risk and debate those who challenge their "positions within the opposition."
I almost managed to persuade them this time, but it fell through..
All right, we will draw conclusions and keep working. Overall, my position has not changed since 2011: power will not change hands as a result of elections.