The "For A Just Russia" Party Stages Primary

UNCLAS MOSCOW 004287 SIPDIS SENSITIVE SIPDIS E.O. 12958: N/A TAGS: PGOV KDEM SOCI RS SUBJECT: The "For A Just Russia" Party Stages Primary -------------- SUMMARY -------------- ¶1. (SBU) Summary. For a Just Russia (SR) held a series of public primaries throughout Russia on August 26 in preparation for the December Duma elections. Far from being a well-run, effective sampling of voter preferences, the primaries seemed to have been slapped together in an effort to keep pace with the rival United Russia political party and to provide SR with additional publicity on the eve of the official kick-off of the election campaign. End summary. -------------- PREMATURE PRIMARIES -------------- ¶2. (U) On August 26, the Kremlin-launched party For a Just Russia (SR) continued its campaign for the December Duma elections by staging national primaries in 53 subjects of the Russian Federation. According to SR Chairman Sergey Mironov, about 383 thousand voters had ultimately cast their votes either by internet or at one of the 683 polling stations open around the country. To date, only twenty-six of the regions have posted results. ¶3. (SBU) Embassy efforts to determine the locations of the primaries in Moscow were unsuccessful. Newspaper reports indicated that journalists had similar difficulties. (The national daily Kommersant reported that of the eighteen planned polling places in Voronezh, only three seemed to be open on primary day.) Press reports suggested little voter interest in the primaries, and only half-hearted attempts by SR activists to induce passers-by to participate. ¶4. (SBU) Inna Nelyuba, the SR Moscow organization's director of the Moscow primaries told us -two days before the primary date-- that she did not have all the necessary permits and could not say where the contests would be held. Information about the location of polling places was also not available on the internet. ¶5. (SBU) Nelyuba said that the SR primaries were open to all Russian citizens who were eligible to vote. A description of each of the candidates and his/her biography would be available at the relevant polling place and write-ins were allowed. ¶6. (U) The Moscow SR branch had arranged for voters to cast their ballots via internet. Although the list of candidates was available on August 24, by August 27 a mere sixty-five internet votes had been cast. Sergey Loktinonov, a party worker and the president of the Russian parachutists organization in Moscow, was in first place among internet voters, with thirty-three percent of the vote, while incumbent Duma deputies were each garnering barely five percent. (In the end, Duma Deputy Aleksandr Lebedev won the Moscow race with 39.5 percent of the vote. Duma Deputy Oksana Dmitrieva won the St. Petersburg contest, with 50.5 percent of the 12 thousand, five hundred votes cast.) ¶7. (SBU) SR Press Secretary Aleksandr Morozov told us that the primaries were one in a series of assessments that SR was conducting in the process of refining its final party lists. According to Morozov, SR had already done four voter surveys and would commission a fifth before the national party conference. The surveys and the primary results would be used by the party leadership in crafting SR's final lists, which would be confirmed at the party conference, to be held either September 16 or 23. ¶8. (SBU) Per Morozov, the regional lists used in the primaries featured only local candidates. Excluded were SR heavy hitters, whose places on the list would be decided only at the September party conference. -------------- COMMENT -------------- ¶9. (SBU) The primaries appeared less an attempt to gauge the electorate's preferences for lists that are, in any event, nearly finalized, than an effort by SR to generate publicity before the beginning of the official campaign in September. The haste with which the August 27 contest was cobbled together (it was announced by Chairman Sergey Mironov on only August 17) suggested that the primaries were part of an effort to remain at parity with the United Russia party, which has been engaged in primaries of its own. BURNS