“It is not ordered to shine”: “United Russia” updates the composition of the deputies in the regions

The United Russia party plans to radically renew its deputies in the upcoming elections to city councils and Legislative Assemblies.

From “opinion leaders” are abandoned in favor of more “resourceful” candidates.

Only a quarter of the speakers of city councils and a third of the heads of Legislative Assemblies received the right to compete for their posts again through the primaries, the correspondent reports. MorningNews.

This year, the elections of the heads of the Legislative Assemblies of the regions will be held in North Ossetia, Udmurtia, the Krasnodar Territory, as well as the Penza, Saratov and Sakhalin regions. The heads of city councils will also be elected in Gorno-Altaisk, Cherkessk, Barnaul, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, Vladivostok, Kirov, Kursk, Omsk, Pskov, Tver and Yaroslavl.

The procedure for nominating candidates for deputies from the United Russia party will be completed in the near future, voters will recognize their future representatives. The deputy’s question is not only about promises “on the ground”, but also about positions with good salaries in those same city and regional parliaments.

Update from below

According to the Vedomosti newspaper, in 2022, United Russia chose to update the composition of its representatives immediately by 25% by persons previously unknown to the public.

Only 30% of the current speakers of the Legislative Assemblies and about 25% of the heads of city councils of deputies received the go-ahead for a new electoral cycle. The rest were insistently told not to participate in the primaries or “lose in a fair fight”.

The party in power has been holding the course for renewal for a long time, but this year it has become a special trend. According to Kommersant, only 15% of the candidates have the status of an acting deputy – a year earlier, every fourth candidate in local and regional elections had this status.

The primaries in 2022 were held exclusively online. The competition in the party for one candidate seat was 6.5 people, a year earlier it was 5 people. United Russia also indicated that 50 current deputies of Legislative Assembly and city councils lost the primaries.

Old-new faces

Despite the apparent “change of faces and formats”, in reality everything remains as before. The party in power increasingly prefers resource candidates who can pay for an expensive campaign on their own to “opinion leaders” and local “people from the people.”

So the first place in the regional list in North Ossetia was taken by a large entrepreneur from Siberia, Vladimir Guriev, and in the Krasnodar Territory, business representatives, mainly large developers, were on the lists of leaders in the preliminary voting.

But there are real surprises in the pre-election fuss that are unusual for the domestic “political clearing”.

The scandalous speaker of the parliament of North Ossetia, Aleksey Machnev, lost the primaries. The fiery speech was delivered not just anywhere, but at a meeting of the council of legislators chaired by President Vladimir Putin.

An exception was made for the chairman of the City Duma of the city of Cherkessk, Yevgeny Belanov. He lost the primaries, but nevertheless became a candidate from the ruling party. Couldn’t find someone more deserving?

The head of the council of the Krasnodar region, Yuri Burlachko, his colleague from the Penza region, Valery Lidin, and the speaker of the regional Duma of the Saratov region, Alexander Romanov, refused to participate in the primaries. It is unlikely that the political career of these citizens is “in the decline”, it is possible that “at the top” they simply asked to temporarily “not shine”.

Experts and political scientists have pointed out more than once that United Russia always shuffles its deputies at the regional level, so few of the speakers of city and regional parliaments have their own significant electoral resource.

At the same time, it is unlikely that political games “under the rug” and the change of one person to another in reality will somehow help ordinary people from the hinterland and improve their already difficult financial situation. No matter how the new wave of exchange “sewed for soap” again left the voters with nothing.