Candidate registration has closed for the municipal council elections in the Avtovo municipal district of St Petersburg. The courts and the election commission refused to register every nominee from A Just Russia and the LDPR.
The formal grounds for barring the A Just Russia candidates from the municipal elections was that the copy of the 2013 decision establishing the party’s local electoral branch did not contain up-to-date information about the electoral association’s name. The A Just Russia members tried to challenge the decision of TEC No. 41. However, on Thursday, 13 August, the St Petersburg City Court upheld it.
It is worth noting that the 20 candidates who were forced out of the race included 11 sitting municipal council deputies. The reason is that in the previous elections in 2021, 19 of the 20 seats went precisely to candidates from A Just Russia.
The party’s team, led by the permanent head of the local branch Gennady Truskanov — a former head of the Avtovo municipal district — controlled the council for more than 20 years. Truskanov’s own political career began with his election as a deputy of the Leningrad City Council back in 1990, with the support of the Democratic Russia bloc.
Now neither Truskanov nor the current head of the municipal district, Ilya Shmakov, who was also elected from A Just Russia in 2021, will be among the candidates for the Avtovo Municipal District Council.
Party leader Sergei Mironov called the decisions to remove his allies from the elections “lawlessness” and stated that there is “no justice in my home city”.
Meanwhile, the local branch of A Just Russia went on the offensive against its competitors who remain registered. Yegor Bushuyev, an aide to the head of the Avtovo municipal district Ilya Shmakov, who is a member of Territorial Election Commission No. 46 from A Just Russia but is also running in the elections as an independent, petitioned the Kirovsky District Court to cancel the registration of United Russia candidates Roman Kotelnikov, Igor Slobodenyuk, Andrei Serov and Yekaterina Skrypnik; Green Party candidates Marina Pavlyuchenko, Natalya Avdeyeva, Yekaterina Golikova and Dmitry Mikhailo; as well as Maxim Gromov and Dmitry Snedkov, nominated by New People.
According to Bushuyev’s version, his rivals may have violated the nomination procedure. In particular, he suggested that the United Russia candidates should have been nominated at a conference of the party’s regional branch, not by the local political council. At the same time, the plaintiff demanded that the documents submitted by his opponents to the commission be provided, including the signatures collected by the candidates in support of their nomination. All of Bushuyev’s lawsuits were dismissed by the court.
In total, 65 candidates were registered for the elections to the Avtovo Municipal District Council. Among those admitted are 61 party candidates and four independents. All representatives of A Just Russia and the LDPR were refused, as were four candidates from New People, and one each from United Russia and the Greens. All nominees from the Communist Party (CPRF) successfully passed the registration stage.