MOSCOW, August 11 (Itar-Tass) — Just Russia leader Sergei Mironov “cannot guarantee that nobody will leave the party anymore”, but promises that the main skeleton, the face of the party will remain”.
Alexander Babakov, Mikhail Starshinov and Vasily Shestakov who joined the Popular Front and were expelled from the Just Russia Party, “played no role in the party, and it turned out that they were just fellow travellers, while Yelena Vtorygina was really a comrade-in-arms who stood at the formation of the party”, Mironov noted in an interview with the Izvestia newspaper, published on Thursday.
Mironov explains the mass exodus from Just Russia by the fact that many of its members turned to be unready to embrace tough and principled stand of the party which “grew stronger as a political force” and which “has become the real opposition to United Russia”.
Mironov also claimed that the very good rating of his party at the start of the election race “scared United Russia very much and then luring his colleagues started”.
“The Kremlin is afraid of our ungovernable nature,” the Just Russia leader reckons. “But nobody have ever governed us. I have not given any promises, and the party has always been independent. When I was a member of the Russian Security Council, I closed personally my mouth. But when I left the post of the Federation Council speaker, I untied my hands,” Mironov continued.
“We are bracing for a tough version at the elections to the State Duma: they will try to bar us from the elections, and we arrange mechanisms in such a way so that it would not be possible to do this,” Mironov noted. “We shall break into the State Duma this time too,” he said with conviction.