Exactly one week ago, I wrote a post titled “In Khabarovsk, it makes sense to go vote.”
Here’s the update: nope, no miracle happened. There will be no real election in Khabarovsk either.
Today, our candidate there, Alexei Vorsin, was removed from the ballot.
The official reason—and you’ll laugh—is that in the form titled “Statement of Income of the Candidate and His Spouse,” the word “spouse” had not been crossed out (Vorsin is currently unmarried).
It’s an official form, and of course you’re not supposed to scribble on it. Otherwise they’d remove him for “crossing out a word by pen on an official form.” They couldn’t come up with any other reason.
An interesting point:
The court ordered the ruling to be enforced immediately. Under the law, this is reserved for exceptional cases: a ruling may be subject to immediate enforcement only if “due to special circumstances, delaying enforcement of this ruling may cause significant harm to public or private interests” (Article 188 of the Code of Administrative Procedure of the Russian Federation).
So in effect, the court acknowledged that Vorsin is not an ordinary candidate but a “special” one, for whom some mysterious “special circumstances” suddenly arose. Election lawyers know that in such cases there is normally no immediate enforcement, and until the ruling is reviewed on appeal, the candidate is allowed to continue campaigning.
We know what those special circumstances are. Vorsin was actively raising the issue of the increase in the pension age. And this “immediate enforcement” is needed so they can seize his leaflets by declaring them illegal campaign materials.
So there you have it. That’s what “taking part in the election” looks like. Once again, we’ve seen that in Putin’s system, only two kinds of candidates can get registered now: a) those fully controlled by the authorities; b) those incapable of winning more than 1–4% and useful as proof of the claim that “the people do not support the opposition.”
There are exceptions, but those who want to point them out in the comments will notice for themselves that they all concern such low levels of local self-government that there may formally be various deputies there, but they have no real powers, and people do not even know they exist.
This is not my assumption. Not a political hypothesis. It is a fact: if you want to influence politics now and feel at least somewhat like a citizen of your country, go to rallies. There is nothing else.
On September 9, there will be no politics at all at the polling stations; all of it will be wherever the nationwide protest action against raising the pension age is taking place. In Khabarovsk, that is especially true.
Will we continue demanding access to the elections? Of course we will. We have the best candidates and a platform that people support.
But we are not going to take a “moderate position,” act hypocritically, and claim that voting is good in and of itself, that there is an observation process, and so on.
There is absolutely nothing good about observing an election where our candidates are not on the ballot. Better to spend your time watching cats in the street. At least they’re cute.
Places