Press Release, 03.08.2018

On 3 August, the Novosibirsk branch of the Yabloko party, together with the representatives of the libertarian movement, held a picket at the public reception of the ruling United Russia party. Deputies of this party voted for adoption in the first reading of the law on raising the retirement age.

The place of the picket was chosen because it is the regional reception office of Dmitry Medvedev, Chairman of the Government of the Russian Federation and  the head of United Russia.

“A lot of people approached us to express their attitude. We did not hear any negative feedback to our picket. People do not accept the “pension reform”, but do not really understand how to stop it. We talked about the possibility of a referendum and who of the deputies from the Novosibirsk region voted for this reform on 19 July,” activists of Yabloko said.

In their view, the pressure on United Russia at this stage is quite an effective practice. Thus, in the city of  Berdsk, the Novosibirsk region, the Council of Deputies gave a negative assessment of the reform, and even deputies from the United Russia party voted for such an assessment. At the end of June, the  Assembly of the Krasnokamsk District of the Perm Territory, on the initiative of Olga Kolokolova, leader of the Perm Yabloko, unanimously decided not to support the bill on raising of the retirement age.

In Novosibirsk, Yabloko believes that each member of the United Russia party should receive an inquiry regarding the attitude to the pension reform with subsequent publication of the answers.

It should be noted that the Yabloko party is one of the organisers of protest actions against raising the retirement age in virtually all regions of Russia. Thus, rallies against pension reform took place in Moscow, Yekaterinburg, Nizhny Novgorod, Voronezh, Orenburg, Kaliningrad, Sochi and Stavropol.