Press Release, 18.09.2020

A regular meeting of the 12th Floor discussion club was held in the Kaliningrad Yabloko office. Its topic was the discussion of the scandalous elections in the Zelenogradsk town, the Kaliningrad region. According to the official data, Yabloko received there only 3.09% and failed to pass the 5% threashold.

In addition to participants in the election process from the Yabloko party, representatives of the “A Just Russia” party and the media took part in the discussion. The discussion was moderated by Olga Ivanova, the Deputy Chair of the regional branch of Yabloko and the authorised representative of the party for the period of the 2020 election campaign.

Elections to local councils were held in eight municipalities of the Kaliningrad region on 13 September. In two constituencies (the towns of Zelenograd and Sovetsk) elections were held according to the mixed type. For the first time, voting was held three days on September 11-13; whereas in the first two days voting was held out of the polling stations, literally on tree stumps, in the backstreets, etc. More than half of the voters in the municipal elections in the Kaliningrad region voted early. The turnout in the region was 32%.

The participants discussed registration of party lists and single-mandate candidates, as well as technologies for their removal by other parties and even by the Public Prosecutor’s Office, as in the case of A Just Russia. All the participants of the round table agreed that the practices of multi-day voting, introduced by the Central Electoral Commission, proved its effectiveness for fraud for the second time (since voting for Vladimir Putin’s constitutional amendments on 1 July). By the way, the Yabloko party challenged this decision of the Central Electoral Commission in the Supreme Court, but the proceedings have been postponed so far.

In addition, observers, and electoral commissions members and candidates spoke about cases of flagrant violations of electoral legislation during the elections. Yabloko filed 13 complaints to different authorities on violations during these elections.

Sergei Dustin, the candidate from Yabloko, who was removed from the registration by his competitors, said: “By the example of Baltiysk, the public was clearly shown that the power does not change in elections. As soon as any political force reaches the level of competition that is visible to the party in power, all the methods available to them, including openly criminal methods, are used. In the conditions of a non-functioning law enforcement and judicial system, it is impossible to resist this within the framework of law”.

Photo: Sergei Dustin

Nevertheless, the members of the 12th Floor club decided not to give up, but, on the contrary, to intensify the struggle for the right to vote and be elected, including significantly increasing the number of electoral commissions members and observers in the next electoral cycle. The regional council of the Yabloko party is going to make a decision at its next meeting of filing lawsuits, and most likely will demand to annul the election results in Zelenogradsk due to enormous number of violations there. The Yabloko party and A Just Russia also agreed to create a temporary coalition in the next elections so that not to compete against each other in the same constituencies.