Press Release, 24.07.2026

Photo: The party’s delegation before submitting documents to the St. Petersburg Electoral Commission / Photo by St. Petersburg Yabloko

At a meeting on 24 July, the St. Petersburg Electoral Commission refused to register Yabloko’s list of candidates for the election of deputies to the Legislative Assembly. If this decision is not overturned, voters in St. Petersburg will not be able to vote for a Yabloko faction in the Legislative Assembly.

St. Petersburg Yabloko regards the City Electoral Commission’s decision as intentionally unlawful and entirely politically motivated. All the documents required for registration had been submitted in full, and all the Commission’s comments had been promptly addressed within the statutory deadline. There were no lawful grounds for refusal. The decision has nothing to do with the law.

“The City Electoral Commission is behaving like the district electoral commissions, where documents belonging to many of our candidates simply ‘disappeared‘. With this decision, the City Electoral Commission is undermining the legitimacy of the forthcoming election, and once again turning St. Petersburg into the capital of electoral lawlessness,” said Dmitry Anisimov, a deputy of the Legislative Assembly and leader of the party’s city-wide candidate list.

The party notes that instead of acting openly and transparently, and ensuring the exercise and protection of citizens’ electoral rights, as required by federal law, the Electoral Commission is doing exactly the opposite. Registration for the election is being conducted as if it were a covert political operation. Pavel Shapchits, Yabloko’s representative on the Electoral Commission, was only able to see the draft decision at the meeting of the Commission, where the matter was raised from the floor. The question of registration had not appeared on the official agenda, despite notification that it would be considered, and Yabloko’s first financial report had not been published on the City Electoral Commission’s website, unlike the reports of all the other political parties.

Yabloko believes that the attempt to remove from the ballot a party supported by hundreds of thousands of voters in St. Petersburg is a blow to citizens’ right to choose. This is the true value of all the talk about genuine support for the current political course and low support for Yabloko: citizens are being denied the right to an alternative. At the same time, the same City Electoral Commission had previously registered the Greens party without any problems, which had allegedly honestly collected 21,000 signatures in just three days.

“Voters in St. Petersburg have the right to vote for those they consider worthy, and to have an alternative. The party will appeal the decision refusing registration and will continue to defend the rights of its voters,” the regional branch of Yabloko said.

On 27 June, the Yabloko party’s Federal Congress approved the nomination of candidates. The party list was headed by Dmitry Anisimov, a sitting deputy of the Legislative Assembly, lawyer Viktoria Razina, Yegor Karpenkov, a specialist in public administration and Master of Theology, and political scientist Dmitry Khorzov. There are 62 candidates across 25 regional groups. In the single-mandate constituencies, the party is represented by lawyers, doctors, scientists, entrepreneurs, teachers, engineers, workers, journalists, civil society activists and historic preservation activists.

“We understood that the fight of the St. Petersburg authorities against the only opposition party would be tough and not based on the law, this has happened many times before. They want a parliament that applauds every initiative of the authorities. We will do everything possible to ensure that voters who support Yabloko in St. Petersburg have their own voice in the city parliament,” said Nikolai Rybakov, Chair of Yabloko.