Yashin has announced his candidacy, and that is good news. Over the past few months, Ilya has proven himself to be someone who genuinely works in the interests of his voters.
And the really good news is that, in his candidacy announcement itself, he said directly that he is ready to take part in the primaries and win them.
Who do we need? A strong candidate focused on winning. And it is precisely victory in the primaries that will best show us who is ready to compete in a real election.
All in all, this is great.
PS Dmitry Gudkov, who had previously said he wanted to run for mayor, reacted to Yashin’s candidacy in a very strange and nervous way.
For some reason, he claimed that this was not Yashin’s doing but mine (!!), and that the whole thing was concocted as a jab at him, Gudkov.
One can only regret that Dmitry seems to think that Yashin, who has long and quite successfully built a political career, is running “out of spite.” Unfortunately, that is not a very adequate reading of the real world. We have not yet conducted large-scale opinion polls in Moscow, but our internal polling among supporters shows that Yashin is significantly more popular than Gudkov.
There is nothing surprising about that. Compare the two candidates’ work on Moscow issues, and you will have no questions left.
In any case, I can only reaffirm what I said publicly in my platform. I will support whichever candidate wins the primaries: Yashin, Gudkov, Rusakova, Mitrokhin, or Galyamina.
What matters to me—and, I think, to most Muscovites—is that my candidate is not afraid to enter fair, open primaries and win them.
Yashin is already ready for that kind of competition, and that makes him a good candidate.
We need good candidates. https://www.yashin2018.ru/