Yabloko has Put Itself on Track to Suffer Another Defeat, Shaburov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, April 10 – The Yabloko Party held a conference last week, and normally, that would hardly be worth noting, Aleksey Shaburov says. But because the Duma campaign is ahead, the decisions the meeting took both on the structure of the party and its campaign strategy matter and are extremely worrisome because they put the party on the path to another defeat.

            According to the Yekaterinburg commentator who edits the Politsovet portal, Yabloko, focused on maintaining Grigory Yavlinsky’s control over the group and on getting enough votes to continue to receive financing rather than acting in ways that might attract more voters to its banner (politsovet.ru/69944-yabloko-pokatilos-k-novomu-porazheniyu.html).

            The party meeting took steps to strengthen internal discipline and thus prevent any regional grouping from challenging Yavlinsky and his team. But what that means is that the party has effectively closed of the rise of a new generation of leaders and the larger number of voters they might attract.

            But of potentially greater and more negative impact were the conference’s decision on election strategy. Instead of trying to come up with slogans to attract more voters and win seats in the Duma, the party committed itself not to negotiating with others about the assignment of districts, thus limiting its chance of winning by conceding other districts to other parties.

            It said it might consider doing so after candidates were named, Shaburov continues; but in fact, this means that there won’t be any division of single-member districts among opposition groups because it is far harder to pull a candidate than not to nominate one in the first place. Thus, both Yabloko and other liberal parties will suffer.

            In addition, the conference declared that Yabloko was giving priority to party list voting rather than to single-member districts, a decision that is “almost political suicide” given that it will find it far harder to get five percent of the vote overall than it would have needed to win particular single-member constituencies.

            Yabloko is clearly counting on a general rise in protest attitudes across the country, but such a rise would have to be enormous given Yabloko’s choices to allow it to retain the voters it now has and gain nearly two million more to reach the five-percent threshold, the Politsovet editor says.

            What appears to be behind Yabloko’s decisions is a desire to win not five percent and enter parliament but three percent and thus continue to receive government funding. It is most likely this that the leaders of the party have decided should be Yabloko’s real task in the upcoming elections.

            And that raises the biggest question of all, Shaburov says. “Why should Russian voters care about that?”