MOSCOW, August 24 (Itar-Tass) —— The chief of the central executive of the United Russia party, Andrei Vorobyov, is certain that half of the party’s faction in the lower house of parliament, the State Duma, will be renewed after the elections in December.
“I think that more than half of the faction’s members will take seats inside the Federal Assembly for the first time, and that they will be people who are trusted locally,” he said, summing up the preliminary results of voting to select candidates from the party in the Duma elections.
Vorobyov said that all participants in the primaries of the United Russia party and the All-Russia Popular Front will be in great demand. “We want the government to be formed clearly and openly, and the quality of local authorities to meet the highest standards,” he stressed. “Preliminary voting helps ensure that these processes should occur in a predictable form.”
Primaries are not a panacea, but an important step forward along the way of “improving the quality of government,” United Russia members say with certainty. Moreover, according to Vorobyov, this is “a serious blow on clans and monopolies”, which often try to secretly propel their representatives to government positions. Broad public discussion of candidates makes the procedure of forming the list transparent and open.
In turn, First Deputy Duma Speaker Oleg Morozov said that after personal participation in the primaries of the ARPF he became a firm supporter of the widespread practice of selecting candidates United Russia has started to use.
“Of late, politicians and the authorities, on the one hand, and the people, on the other have began to live aloof from each other, in any case, citizens are not well informed on how the party lists are formed,” he said, noting that voters do not usually know how people who do not have anything to do with this or that party get into the lists. Morozov, in particular, recalled that at a certain point a person with a foreign passport appeared on the list of the Communist Party and only at the last minute, under pressure from the public, the Communists removed his candidacy.
The first deputy speaker is convinced that the rule of holding primaries should be mandatory for all political parties.
“We ourselves (United Russia) will improve this mechanism,” Morozov said, explaining that not in all regions early voting in the ARPF was conducted satisfactorily. “We will improve the procedure and will make it more understandable and transparent,” he concluded, adding at the same time confident that the primaries must become a part of Russia’s political life.