Is The Kremlin Afraid of a Tiny Party?

Russia’s Supreme Court has barred the Yabloko party from standing in September’s parliamentary elections, on the grounds of alleged breaches of electoral law. Yabloko is pushing for an immediate end to Russia’s war against Ukraine. Many opposition figures recently called on the population to vote for the party, which has not had a parliamentary group in the Duma since 2003. Dangerous indicator eliminatedJOIN US ON TELEGRAMFollow our coverage of the war on the @Kyivpost_official. Eitvydas Bajarūnas, former Lithuanian ambassador to Russia, analyses the reasons behind the exclusion in LRT (Lithuania) : “Even within a highly flawed electoral system controlled by the government, the number of votes for Yabloko could become one of the few public indicators of how many people in Russia are actually prepared to say: ‘No, the war is not our choice.’ Even if this figure were small, its very appearance in the public sphere would be politically significant. And if it turned out to be larger than the Kremlin expects, it would undermine one of the key myths of the war propaganda – namely, that Russian society supports the war almost unanimously and that only an insignificant fringe group opposes it.” The results are fabricated anyway Election results in Russia are not representative anyway, economist Konstantin Sonin (Russia) explains on Facebook: “Firstly, elections are only meaningful if all potential candidates are allowed to stand, and this has not been the case in Russia since 2003. In 2026, a large part of the political spectrum will not be represented. Secondly, as the experience of elections from 2008 to 2019 has shown, the manipulation of the results reached such proportions that it was very difficult to assess how many people had voted for or against the government even when they had the choice. As the [2024] Moscow City Duma election demonstrated, electronic voting made it possible not only to falsify votes, but also, in effect, to fabricate the results.” Other Topics of Interest ‘I’ll Break Your Head’: Russian Anti-War Candidate Gets Death Threats Ahead of Elections Russian anti-war candidate Kirill Rumyantsev says he and his family have received death threats and pressure to quit the September elections. Whipping boy had become a threat Russia’s leader has been gripped by fear, observes columnist Viktor Shenderovich (Russia) on Facebook: “The Kremlin had planned for Yabloko to suffer the typical fate of a whipping boy: to secure two or three percent of the vote and once again demonstrate the marginality of liberal ideas in Russia. But the growing anti-war sentiment in Russia has evidently thwarted this plan. ... Of course, it wasn’t about fear of the official results (they could rig the figures as they see fit), but about the election campaign itself – about the party having the opportunity to broadcast anti-war propaganda on television for at least a month – entirely legally!”