"Vedomosti": "Locomotives Do Their Job"
The Central Election Commission has turned a blind eye on the fact that the Sverdlovsk Region Governor and the Mayor of Yekaterinburg have waived their parliamentary mandates. This will enable the two vote-getters (or "locomotives") to keep their places on the bench of stand-by candidates.
At its meeting yesterday the CEC conveyed the deputy's mandate of Alexander Koval of the United Russia party, who has been appointed the head of Rostekhnadzor, to a member of the party's Political Council in Petersburg, Irina Sokolova, who used to be the head of Vladimir Putin's public reception office. The mandate will go to another candidate in the same regional group as that of the deputy who has dropped out. The mandate goes to another group if all the candidates in the first group have already been elected deputies or have waived their mandates. In the Sverdlovsk group Governor Eduard Rossel and Mayor Arkady Chernetsky, who top the regional list of candidates, have dropped out. Both waived their parliamentary seats, so United Russia can look for a replacement to Mr Koval in another regional group.
Yevgeny Kolyushin, a member of the CEC, yesterday proposed to the Commission to strike both men off the list of candidates citing the Law on Elections to the State Duma, whereby a person who twice waives his mandate is liable to be dropped from the list. Mr Rossel and Mr Chernetsky first did it, along with other "locomotives," immediately after the elections in 2007, Mr Kolyushin recalled.
However, his proposal was rejected: Rossel and Chernetsky remain on the list of candidates, says CEC Secretary Nikolai Konkin. They have not filed a written waiver to the Central Election Commission (the Commission received notification that Rossel and Chernetsky have lodged their waivers with the Presidium of the party's General Council). A waiver filed with the party is not valid, Mr Konkin insists. The practice has a precedent: similar situations have already been reviewed by the Central Election Commission. According to CEC member Valery Kryukov, there have been about 10 such cases. So far only two "locomotives", the former Governor of the Amur Region, Nikolai Kolesov, and the former Mayor of Pskov, Mikhail Khoronen, forfeited their chance to get into this Duma, Mr Konkin says.
The CEC is distorting the meaning of the ban, Mr Kolyushin fumes. It actually nullifies the ban, echoes a non-voting CEC member Andrei Klychkov of the KPRF. Not only does it allow a party to keep seats and distribute them at its discretion, but Rossel, for example, who is 70 and whose term as Governor runs out in November, may soon need a safe landing site. It makes it possible for Vladimir Putin to remain a candidate indefinitely, stresses Mr Klychkov: under the law, Mr Putin should be the first to whom the mandate should be offered.
Even if Mr Rossel is not reappointed it would be hard to get him a Duma seat, a United Russia deputy argues: the chances that another free mandate will appear or the seats in other groups will be exhausted are slim. But another United Russia member says that the system does work: as a rule, the Governor puts in the regional list a person who, if necessary, can be kicked out of Parliament to vacate a seat for him.
