Russian billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov’s recently announced Civic Platform party will recruit candidates from “real life,” Prokhorov said on Tuesday.
“The idea of the new concept is that the leaders that will be promoted by the party in politics, must not appear from inside the party. We will seek them out in real life, based on their everyday deeds,” Prokhorov wrote in his blog.
The creation of the party is the billionaire’s third political project over the last year. In 2011 Prokhorov briefly headed the Right Cause, a flagging liberal party with Kremlin connections until being ousted by the party bureaucracy in a coup that he suspected was the Kremlin’s revenge for his opposition slant.
In March 4 presidential elections that secured a third term for Vladimir Putin, the tycoon-turned-politician finished third with over eight percent of the votes.
Prokhorov however did not seem to leverage his political potential and left the scene until May 23 when he wrote in his blog: “It’s time to act!”
“Those who can find support in the regions will become candidates from our party…to enter into power and do what people need,” Prokhorov said, while describing how the party will operate.
The Civic Platform party that will comprise 500 members, the minimal number for the registration of a political movement.
The tycoon said on Monday he would not join the party as its head.
“Prokhorov’s decision to create a party was likely prescribed by political strategists,” a political analyst Stanislav Belkovsky told RIA Novosti, adding that “Prokhorov is trying to attract all the prosperous candidates from regions and local governments to his party.”
Speaking about the future of the billionaire’s party, another political expert, Mikhail Vinogradov, the chairman of the St. Petersburg Politics Fund said: “If there is no serious protest movement, Prokhorov’s party will be rather reasonable option for opposition candidates to participate in the elections. But if the protests mount, it will be an insignificant project.”
Prokhorov, 46, whose fortune Forbes put at $13 billion in March, also did not rule out to run for Moscow mayor.