Press Release, 25.07.2017

Video: Boris Vishnevsky

Over 3,000 people came out to protest against criminal arbitrariness of the authorities in banning opposition to run in the municipal and gubernatorial elections in St. Petersburg. The rally was organised with the support of the regional branch of the Yabloko party. Boris Vishnevsky, head of the Yabloko faction in the Legislative Assembly of St.Petersburg, and Maxim Katz, head of the Yabloko election headquarters in the municipal elections in St. Petersburg, addressed the rally.

Boris Vishnevsky, who had been nominated by Yabloko to run in the gubernatorial election but was banned from the election by the authorities, noted that what was happening in the elections in St. Petersburg fell under Article 278 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation: forcible seizure or retention of power.

“They are trying to steal power from us, steal the city and the country, steal our future. This is natural for crooks and villains. But it is natural for us to resist this,” Vishnevsky noted.

He also stressed that a third of St. Petersburg’s voters would not see their candidates on the ballot at the gubernatorial election, which had been turned into a farce, just like five years ago.

Vishnevsky stressed that the easiest way to prevent the authorities from making acting Governor Beglov head of the city again was to “cancel such elections without a choice and show disagreement with the fraudulent selection of candidates” and thwart the plans of the authorities and Prigozhin’s trolls factory, this can be done if all three candidates who received signatures of municipals deputies (required for registration in the election) with the help of the authorities would withdraw from the election.

Video: Maxim Katz

Maxim Katz, head of the election headquarters of Yabloko in the municipal elections in St. Petersburg, recalled that the party nominated almost 600 excellent young people as candidates for municipal deputies, but most of them were banned from elections.

“St.Petersburg district electoral commissions demonstrated their cynical and deceitful attitude to the elections. All this is done so that we become disillusioned and give up on politics,” Maxim Katz said.

“If we continue fighting hard, then everything will work out. Seventy percent of the candidates from Yabloko are registered, each of them will dig the ground to win this mandate, but you should help them to oust the crooks [from municipalities] — come to the polls and vote,” added the head of the Yabloko election headquarters in the municipal elections in St. Petersburg .

It should be noted that St. Petersburg municipal elections attracted the attention of the whole country not only because of the use of an administrative resource there, but also because of criminal arbitrariness on the part of regional authorities and electoral commissions seeking to prevent opposition candidates from running in the elections.

In St. Petersburg, Yabloko nominated 547 candidates for deputies of 85 municipal councils of the city. Today only 227 candidates were able to register, more than 250 received unlawful denials in registration, the party’s election headquarters intends to challenge all the refusals issued to Yabloko candidates in the City Electoral Commission and the Central Electoral Commission.