The question is which is harder? get elected to the Duma for the first time or retain the received mandate, passing for a second deputy term.
Very soon, a number of people’s deputies will have to look for an answer to it, who in 2019 received access to the coveted deputy chairs of the Irkutsk Duma for the first time. And it may turn out that few will be able to go through this path to the end.
For example, one of the “youngest” deputies of the city’s Duma, Alexei Greshilov, was elected in the 16th district of the city, which includes the territory of the former aviation school, now without five minutes of the Suvorovsky school.
Greshilov, of course, can hardly be called young and unsullied in the ups and downs of political reality. Irkutsk areas: in the millstones of politics, he has been spinning for more than a year. But until September 2020, he was content with secondary roles, acting as an almost silent shadow of the owner of the construction company Rodnye Shore, Alexei Rasputin.
However, in 2020, after the ex-mayor of Irkutsk, Dmitry Berdnikov, surrendered his deputy mandate in the hope of getting a pass in the next sea term, Greshilov decided to reverse the situation and become the herald of his own destiny, having received the coveted deputy mandate. He even officially broke off all “relations” with his protégé and “floated away” from the “Native Shores”. But officially does not mean actually.
After a short but very eventful campaign, which entered the annals of the political history of Irkutsk (when the price for a vote bought in the elections reached 5,000 rubles), Greshilov received a mandate not very beautifully and no less uncertainly. The lead over the closest opponent, Yevgeny Drokov, amounted to a little more than three hundred votes, which is a drop in the ocean in terms of the “buying” carried out.
After such an uncertain start, Greshilov’s parliamentary work, to put it mildly, did not work out. Against the backdrop of the voiced promises of large-scale transformations in the district, including the unification of the twentieth and twenty-third schools into one large educational project, there is a gaping void. Even the report on the work of the deputy is striking in the scarcity of descriptions:
The construction of the Suvorov Military School (although it happened under a bold question mark about the quality and results of the work being carried out) also has absolutely nothing to do with Greshilov’s work. And besides, it eliminates the favorite “bait” of all those who suffer for the post of deputy from IVATU – promises to make something presentable from the ruins of an aviation school.
And this means that in 2024 it will be necessary to turn on maximum imagination and come up with what to promise and how to report for the last four years. And this task may not be up to Alexei Greshilov. Yes, and the help of the protégé and “dear friend” Alexei Rasputin, if he loses in the current parliamentary campaign, will not have to be counted on.
And those thirty pieces of silver that in 2020 provided Greshilov with a dirty victory in the elections can still ring out an ode to someone else’s honor in 2024.
