Press release, 01.08.2017

Yabloko’s candidates for the municipal elections in Moscow will stand for the citizens’ right to hold local referendums. Yabloko leaders have announced this at a press conference today.

“Yabloko’s team of deputies stands for direct democracy in Moscow at the local level, so that all the decisions could be made taking the citizens’ opinion into consideration,” Yabloko Chair Emilia Slabunova said.

She reminded that not a single city or local referendum had taken place in Moscow in recent years. At the same time, 2,503 local referendums were held in Russia within the last ten years.

“We think it is high time to let the Muscovites make their own decisions,” the leader of Yabloko explained.

According to Slabunova, the main obstacle for direct democracy today is the majority of deputies who are taking orders directly from the Moscow Mayor’s Office today. But they follow other goals – to hold their personal, including commercial, interests. “Local government is the level where vital decisions should be made by the citizens. The mechanisms do exist. Yabloko’s deputies will be able to make them function. They will become the new modern politicians of the local level who can listen to the residents and act in their favour,” she said.

The politician also said that Moscow Mayoral elections would take place the following year and only Yabloko’s municipal deputies would enable participation of oppostional candidates for the city mayor [TN: municipal deputies can put signatures in support of mayoral candidates, which they need to collect in order to got through the municipal filter].

“One third of our candidates are women, two thirds of them are men. Over 85 per cent of the nominees have higher education. A quarter of them are heads of enterprises of different levels, 10 per cent of the candidates are entrepreneurs. One third of the candidates are professionals: architects, designers, scholars, environmentalists, IT workers,” Yabloko Deputy Chair Nikolai Rybakov explained.

“People must have the right to decide what is right for them at the local level, therefore the professional experience of Yabloko’s candidates will be of use,” Rybakov said.

He reminded that when the candidates came to Yabloko, they made the following political statement – they all signed the Moscow Manifesto.

Politician Dmitry Gudkov noted that democrats had managed to make a coalition and thanked Yabloko for that.
“Our goal is to create such a political force that the government will have to face. We plan to have hundreds of deputies, tens of thousands of volunteers, we want to have an active supporter in every house,” he said.

Deputy Chair of the Moscow branch of Yabloko Galina Mikhaleva said that programme for the municipal elections in Moscow was founded on the basis of Yabloko’s federal programme called Respect for a Person.

Moscow is a controversial city, the problems in the districts differ from each other, therefore working on the local level is vital, the politician noted.

Yabloko Chair Emilia Slabunova also said that Yabloko had nominated over a thousand candidates, about 750 of them had been registered and were getting ready to begin the campaign.