Press Release, 9.09.2024

Photo: A ballot with an inscription “For Vishnevsky! For Yabloko!”.

Alexander Shishlov, Chairman of the St. Petersburg regional branch of the Yabloko party and the head of the Yabloko faction in the Legislative Assembly of St. Petersburg, commented on the elections of the Governor of St.Petersburg and municipal deputies that took place on 6-8 September.

– It is difficult for me to call the event that took place in St.Petersburg elections. After all, only “rivals” convenient for the authorities were allowed to participate in the gubernatorial campaign, they virtually neither campaigned, nor even participated in the election debates. In the municipal elections, all candidates nominated by the Yabloko party, running under the slogan “For Peace and Freedom! For a ceasefire agreement!”, as well as many other candidates who were inconvenient for the city administration, were denied registration under far-fetched pretexts.

All this made it impossible to have an open and broad public discussion during the election campaign – about choosing the future, about how to solve existing problems that the current city authorities had not been able to cope with.

The September elections in St.Petersburg were turned into an event where there was no place for competition between programmes and ideas. The three-day voting, which made it difficult to control the safety of ballots, and numerous reports of violations at polling stations, emphasised the imitation nature of the past campaign.

Despite administrative pressure to encourage employees of different organisations to participate in the voting, even official data on the turnout showed that more than 60% of St.Petersburg voters ignored this event.

Those who orchestrated the current election campaign achieved the result they needed at the cost of further growth of public mistrust in elections, and, therefore, destruction of the legitimacy of the state and confidence in the future.

The Yabloko party always participates in elections, but we cannot call the past “electoral procedure” elections.

The highest “approval filter” for municipal deputies in the country and the unconstitutional legislation on “foreign agents” showed citizens that these elections were intended only for safe, obedient and government-approved candidates.

***

[Yabloko’s] Boris Vishnevsky, who was declared a “foreign agent,” was unable to participate in the gubernatorial elections, Olga Yurkevich, a Yabloko candidate, was not allowed to participate in the by-elections to the Legislative Assembly in district No 18, and all 83 candidates nominated by the party for the municipal deputy elections were not allowed to participate.