Summing up the results of the elections

Press Release, 11.09.2023

In the elections held on 10 September, Yabloko managed to retain representation in the city parliamets of Yekaterinburg, Veliky Novgorod and Krasnokamsk (the Perm region), as well as create a faction in the city duma of Yasnogorsk (the Tula region). The team of municipal deputies from Yabloko has also been reinforced. All candidates from the party participated in the elections under the slogan “For Peace!”

In the elections to the Yekaterinburg City Duma, the Yabloko list of candidates received about 21,000 votes. This is 9.2% of all those who voted and almost twice as much as in the past elections to the Yekaterinburg City Duma in 2018. The Yabloko faction will continue to work in the Yekaterinburg city parliament. The head of the faction is Konstantin Kiselyov is a candidate of philosophical sciences, and a professor. In the City Duma of the previous convocation, Kiselyov was the Chairman of the Commission on Social Protection and Healthcare.

It should be noted that candidates from Yabloko in Yekaterinburg in single-mandate constituencies also demonstrated good results: ten out of 21 candidates for deputies from Yabloko came second; none of the party’s candidates came in last in their constituencies. On the average, Yabloko candidates scored 11%. The best results among single-mandate candidates from Yabloko are 18%, 18.5% and 19%.

The Yabloko candidates list in the elections to the City Duma of Veliky Novgorod received 7.37% of voter support, gaining more than 2,600 votes. Thus, Yabloko will go on working in the Novgorod City Duma in the next convocation. Anna Cherepanova, the leader of the Novgorod branch of Yabloko, a fifth-generation Novgorod resident and Candidate of Economic Sciences, will continue protecting the interests of Novgorod residents.

Olga Kolokolova, a member of the Federal Bureau of the Yabloko party and head of the Perm regional branch of Yabloko, won the election of deputies to the City Duma of Krasnokamsk (the Perm Territory) in her constituency. Olga Kolokolova lives in Krasnokamsk. She was a deputy of the Krasnokamsk City Duma of the first and second convocations, and a deputy of the Zemstvo (Land) Assembly of the Krasnokamsk region of the sixth convocation. In these elections she received 54.36% of voters’ support.

Yabloko candidate and entrepreneur Marina Lesnikova was elected as a deputy of the Yasnogorsk City Assembly, the Tula region, taking the first place in the five-mandate district getting 44% of the vote.

Entrepreneur and social activist Marina Lesnikova was supported by 10-20% more voters than candidates from the ruling United Russia.

The team of Yabloko municipal deputies was reinforced by Valentin Baymetov, who was elected to the Council of Deputies of the urban settlement of Miloslavskoye in the Ryazan region. He received 28% of the votes. Baymetov will be the fourth municipal deputy from Yabloko in the region.

We should also note high results our candidate in the Moscow region, Kirill Yankov, a member of the Yabloko Party Arbitration Commission and Chairman of the Union of Passengers, who ran for the regional Duma in the Pushkino single-mandate constituency in the Moscow Region. Although he failed to receive a mandate, Yankov received about 8.400 votes, gaining more than 21% of the votes in the city of Chernogolovka.

Yabloko party Chairman Nikolai Rybakov commented on the election results noting that the result can be assessed in the future.

“If we manage to bring peace closer by our election campaign “For Peace!” – that means that our work was not in vain. If we manage to save at least one human life with this election campaign, then everything that we – our candidates, volunteers, observers, and voters – have being doing for these months was not in vain,” Nikolai Rybakov concluded.

Yabloko founder Grigory Yavlinsky, speaking about the situation in the country and Yabloko’s participation in the elections, emphasised that election campaigns and work in legislative bodies in Russia represent now the only and still legal opportunity to conduct a public political discussion with people about peace and freedom. “In our conditions, this is a direct form of conversation with people about the most important things that determine not only today, but also the future. This is a way to attract people’s attention to politics, an attempt to form a society that does not exist yet.”

In these elections, Yabloko was the only political organisation campaigning for peace and freedom, Yavlinsky said. “No one else in our country dared conduct election campaigns calling for peace and freedom. In conditions of total state censorship and repressions that are gaining momentum every day, when dozens of thousands are sent to the frontline, many of whom return in coffins, – it does worth a lot to reach out to people and tell them that without peace and freedom there is no future, that it is necessary to achieve a ceasefire, that there is nothing more important than saving human lives,” Yavlinsky noted.