Press release, video 19.09.2016

The leaders of the YABLOKO party Grigory Yavlinsky and Emilia Slabunova summed up the results of the voting day at the briefing which took place in the electoral headquarters of the party.

Grigory Yavlinsky began the briefing by thanking the millions of voters who voted for YABLOKO.

According to Yavlinsky, the most important thing in this campaign was to declare that “war with Ukraine is an unacceptable policy, that the situation with Crimea can not remain as it is now, and that Russia’s political and economic system has exhausted itself, it no longer has any resources.”

“We clearly explained that this system can not be not reformed. The system has been degrading, the decline in the economy is obvious, it moves around zero, while the world goes forward,” Grigory Yavlinsky said.

He stressed that Russia found itself in isolation. “The country was put in the conditions where everyone can bring claim against it, assign sanctions, and declare restrictions.” YABLOKO considers such policy unacceptable and [the party] said in this elections what should be done so that to change it: elect a new president, replace the government and the State Duma.”

Yavlinsky also noted that the party was aware that “it would be naïve to expect that with such a stance we would be invited to the State Duma.” “If such a party with such a stance could be part of the State Duma, it would have been a different country. Therefore, the most valuable for us was the fact that we, in our own country and in the most difficult moment, managed to tell what we considered the most important, and we were heard,” he said.

He drew attention of all who gathered in the head-quarters that, according to the preliminary data, YABLOKO got from 11 to 15 per cent of the vote in Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Yavlinsky also said that “the low turnout was a shame of this system”, it proved once again that “the system was in the dead end.” He noted that the turnout demonstrated unrepresentative character of these elections.

According to Yavlinsky, the authorities employed a special technology to suppress the turn out, “because living standards had been falling, the economy was in a fall, and [the ruling party] United Russia could not even promise anything.”

Grigory Yavlinsky stressed that the new Duma “will maintain the policies towards isolation from the common sense, the policies towards isolation from the future, the policies suppressing the most active part of the population.”