I want my position to be absolutely clear: I am in favor of participating in the elections. I want to take part in the elections. I demand the right to participate in the elections.
The decree calling the State Duma elections has been signed, and today the main question we must ask ourselves is not at all “who should we vote for?” but rather “what are elections?”
For me, elections are not “a relatively honest vote count so that Bolotnaya doesn’t happen again,” as the head of the Central Election Commission quite candidly puts it (a reference to the Bolotnaya protests in Moscow in 2011–2012).
At a minimum, elections mean:
The admission of candidates and parties to participate in the elections.
Equal opportunities for campaigning.
An honest vote count.
If all we are being promised is point 3, then first, it is hard to believe, and second, it is not enough.
We want to participate in the elections, and today, both on my own behalf and on behalf of the Progress Party, I am appealing to President Putin, Prime Minister Medvedev, and Central Election Commission Chair Ella Pamfilova to demand that we be allowed to take part in the elections.
We have both the political and the legal right to do so.
The Progress Party has taken more legal steps toward registration than any other party in Russia, and three times we were unlawfully denied. The party was eventually registered, but soon afterward it was stripped of the right to participate in elections by an unlawful decision of the Justice Ministry, with the active support of the Central Election Commission, and then ultimately dissolved.
To this day, the Progress Party still has the highest level of support among democratic parties, even though it is effectively forbidden to mention it in the state-controlled media.
I personally took part in an election quite recently, and even after some of the votes were stolen, according to the official results I still received the support of 28% of voters in the country’s largest city.
So the Kremlin’s contemptuous line — “we don’t register them because nobody is interested in them” — clearly does not work here.
The Russian Constitution states quite clearly:
I, Alexei Anatolyevich Navalny, am legally competent and not being held in a place of detention. Therefore, I demand to be allowed to take part in the elections.
Not to mention that the conviction used to bar me from the elections was overturned by the European Court.
At this point, all that is required is:
- an order from Medvedev overturning the Justice Ministry’s decision to dissolve the Progress Party.
- the Central Election Commission’s agreement to apply the Constitution as a directly enforceable legal document (as the Constitution itself explicitly states) and to allow me and others like me onto the ballot (Khodorkovsky is another example).
These are our political and formal demands.
Here:
Complaint to the Constitutional Court
I call on all voters with democratic views to stop engaging in this foolish and pointless debate (which, incidentally, has now been going on for exactly 20 years): What should we do in the elections? Vote for Yabloko to push it up to 3% and preserve its state funding, or vote for PARNAS and deprive Yabloko of that funding?
This is not even about politics, and it is certainly not about change.
There can be only one question: why is a party that is capable of running a campaign and competing — a party that would create a democratic faction in the State Duma — being barred from the elections?
Dear media, the main question for the head of the Central Election Commission should be this: if you are promising free and competitive elections, why are you not allowing the Progress Party to take part? Why are you, Ella Pamfilova, not personally challenging this unconstitutional ban in the Constitutional Court? Why are you not correcting the unlawful position of the previous head of the Central Election Commission, who backed the Justice Ministry in its actions to dissolve the party?
Our attitude toward these elections should be determined precisely by the position taken on allowing all those who have the right to participate to do so.