Press Release, 18.02.2025

The Electoral Commission of the Pskov Region refused to register the initiative group for the referendum on the issues of direct elections of the head the Gdov District and the preservation of rural administrations in the Gdov district. The reason for the refusal was the fact that the initiative group included 37 people, and not exactly 30. The initiative group included current deputies of the Gdov District Assembly from Yabloko Alexander Konashenkov, Irina Kuryleva and Daria Kalinina, former head of the district Yuri Pavlov, nominated by Yabloko, as well as the candidate for the post of head of the district in the 2024 elections from the party Yevgeny Vasilyev.

Residents of the Gdov district wanted to put two issues to the referendum – on direct elections of the head, and the preservation of the administrations of large settlements of the Gdov District, which after being transformed into a single district will be liquidated along with the volost government.

According to the Electoral Commission, this contradicts the requirements of the regional law on local referendums, which was hastily adopted by the deputies of the Pskov Regional Assembly on 20 December, 2024. The draft law was provided to the deputies for review less than a day before the start of the session. According to the new rules, the local referendum initiative group must include 30 people, while the federal law established the norm of at least 10 citizens, and this norm was enshrined in the previous regional law.

Alexei Maksimov, a member of the Electoral Commission with the right to vote from Yabloko, filed a dissenting opinion on this decision:

“The approach with a precise definition of the number of participants in the initiative group is unacceptable, since in essence an upper quantitative limit is established for the composition of the initiative group, which is a direct restriction on the right of citizens to put forward a local referendum initiative and participate in the activities of the initiative group.

Such an assessment correlates with the wording of the norm of the Federal Law that a group of citizens who have the right to participate in the relevant referendum have the right to form an initiative group of at least ten people to put forward an initiative to hold a local referendum.

In addition, such an understanding of the law creates opportunities for abuse in the activities of electoral commissions, which only need to find inaccuracies in the information about one participant in the initiative group to refuse to register the group,” the lawyer believes.

It should be noted that at the final session of 2024, the deputies of the Pskov Regional Assembly decided to merge all the settlements of the Gdov District into a single entity. After many months of efforts, the regional authorities were still able to push through the municipal “reform”. They failed to do this in the spring: the volost deputies voted against it several times in a row and successfully defended the citizens’ right to local self-government.