The pre-election congress of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation was held under the sign of an open demarche and with a whiff of Navalnism
The top three of the federal list included the permanent Gennady Zyuganov, pilot-cosmonaut Svetlana Savitskaya and director of the Lenin State Farm Pavel Grudinin.
The last character, the sponsor of a party with a trail of business scandals, believes political scientist Maxim Zharov, will probably not be happy in the Kremlin.
“The appearance of Grudinin in the top five of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation party list is the reaction of the leadership of the Communist Party to the attempts of political administrators to agree on the “sterilization” of their Duma campaign by the Communists. These negotiations obviously failed, after which there followed a rumor about Zyuganov’s next departure to the Federation Council, in response to which Grudinin appeared on the party list,” Zharov wrote in his Telegram channel.
The Moscow list was headed, contrary to forecasts, by Valery Rashkin, a sympathizer of criminal blogger Alexei Navalny, who has already promised to carry out a series of anti-vaccination protests in Moscow. And this despite the insertion of a video in which Rashkin is intriguing against Zyuganov’s favorite Yuri Afonin, as well as harsh statements by the leader of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation against Navalnism.
“It seems that rumors of a split in the ranks of the Communists were greatly exaggerated. The Kremlin has not yet succeeded in getting rid of the Communists as the second party in parliament. Instead, we are waiting for a rather tough campaign in the elections to the State Duma 2021, where, sensing the weakness of United Russia, the political elites decided not to play giveaways, but to try to bite off a bigger piece,” wrote liberal political scientist Ilya Grashchenkov.
The Communist Party of the Russian Federation added another Navalnist to the list - Samara regional deputy Nikolai Bondarenko. He took part in winter protests and, following Rashkin, actively used the services of liberal media. True, the communists did not dare to nominate him in the same district as the speaker of the outgoing State Duma, Vyacheslav Volodin.
The Communist Party of the Russian Federation invited political scientist Nikolai Platoshkin, who was recently sentenced to five years probation for calls for unauthorized rallies, to the congress. His wife is running for the party on one of the regional lists. Gennady Zyuganov defiantly came out with Platoshkin to journalists and spoke out in his support.
At the same time, the writer Zakhar Prilepin, who is close to the Kremlin, was not allowed to attend the congress. He planned to speak to the delegates and propose that the communists create a coalition with A Just Russia, of which he is a co-chair. However, Gennady Zyuganov responded quite sharply to the proposal. According to him, if Prilepin wants to form a coalition with the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, he needs to leave his current party.
Zyuganov declared his frontier sentiments in the upcoming elections the day before in an interview with Kommersant. He stated that he was ready to defend the election results, including at street rallies, and not only authorized ones.
“As soon as 50-100 thousand people come out, no one will dare to raise a hand against them. The security forces themselves will see them off and applaud. The authorities, by avoiding course correction and continuing to rely on electoral manipulations, themselves increase the likelihood of such a development of events. If the elections are dishonest, then everything will end in a big fight,” Zyuganov threatens.
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